Cardano: 9.6 million ADA up for a vote, what to check before November 20

Here is what is documented: since October 21 a proposal for 9.6 million ADA from the Cardano treasury has been up for a vote, the deadline falls on November 20, 2026, and as of October 28 holders of 89.25 percent of the voting power had not cast a vote at all. Our own reading follows further down: it is not the opposing votes that will decide this proposal but the silence, because on Cardano a voting right that goes unused counts arithmetically as a no.

The proposal was filed by the company Trivolve Tech together with the Cardano Foundation. It would expand a management system for police evidence that writes checksums of individual exhibits onto the Cardano blockchain. If you hold ADA and have delegated it, that delegation carries a voting weight which either counts during these three weeks or does not.

9.6 million ADA for a police system: what the proposal covers

The project in question is called the Police Force Management System, PFMS for short. It is an open-source platform meant to make the path of an exhibit traceable from the place it was found through the forensic laboratory to the prosecutor and the court. The technical core is plain enough: a cryptographic checksum is generated for every entry and stored on the Cardano blockchain. Anyone who later wants to know whether a file has been altered recalculates the checksum and compares it with the entry on the blockchain.

Checksums, briefly explained: a checksum is a fixed string calculated from a file. Change a single character in that file and the checksum comes out completely different. Only the string ever goes on the blockchain, never the exhibit itself. That is also why a system of this kind can run on a public blockchain without a data protection problem: the content cannot be reconstructed from the checksum.

The proposal was calculated at a planning rate of $0.23 per ADA, which works out at roughly $2.2 million. There is a cap on the upside: if ADA climbs above $0.30, the figure stays at $2.88 million and anything beyond that returns to the treasury. Payment does not come in one go but in five tranches tied to milestones, spread over 15 months and administered by the Cardano Foundation.

The planning rate of $0.23 sits above today's level

There is a point here that the reporting on the proposal has so far left out, and it can be checked with arithmetic. ADA trades at $0.1938 on Saturday afternoon (CoinGecko, October 31, 16:43 UTC), moving between $0.1900 and $0.1967 over the day. At that rate the 9.6 million ADA are worth around $1.86 million. Against the $2.21 million the proposal assumed on October 21, that leaves a gap of roughly $348,000, or 15.8 percent.

This is not a drafting error but the mechanics of a treasury that budgets in its own currency: an amount of ADA is requested, while wages and servers are paid in dollars and rupees. If the rate falls between application and payout, the project's budget shrinks while the treasury hands over the same quantity. The cap at $0.30 protects the treasury from an overpriced project. There is no floor underneath, and because the five tranches run across 15 months, the project carries that risk for the full term.

From Uttar Pradesh to the next state: where the system already runs

The platform is not new. Trivolve already operates an evidence management system in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh that writes its checksums to the Cardano mainnet. According to the proposal it handles around 11,000 transactions a month there, more than 156,000 in total so far. The report by The Crypto Basic names the state of Telangana as the next location. We have no second independent confirmation of that, so the detail stands here as an attribution rather than a fact.

For the network itself the expansion would be measurable in figures. The proposal budgets for more than 1.5 million transactions in the first year, an average of 127,500 a month, and puts that at an increase of roughly 18.2 percent on average mainnet activity. Money is meant to flow back through query fees: a verification request costs from $1.89, and of that revenue 70 percent goes to the treasury, 20 percent into maintaining the open-source library and 10 percent to Trivolve Tech.

The 67 percent threshold and the constitutional committee

A treasury payout on Cardano needs two approvals. The delegated representatives, known in the network as DReps, have to ratify it with 67 percent, and the constitutional committee has to wave it through with 67 percent as well. If either is missing, the proposal lapses when the deadline passes on November 20, the end of epoch 669.

DReps, briefly explained: a DRep is an elected representative to whom holders assign their voting weight without giving up their ADA. That weight follows the quantity delegated, not the number of people behind it.

Why 89.25 percent of non-voters work like a no

This is where the proposal is decided, and the arithmetic surprises a good many holders. The 67 percent refer to the entire delegated voting weight, not to the votes actually cast. Anyone who does not vote is therefore not abstaining neutrally; their weight lands arithmetically on the side of rejection.

The position as of October 28: 5.95 percent of the voting weight in favour, 4.80 percent against, 89.25 percent with no vote at all. Four days earlier, in the weekly update from Intersect dated October 24, approval stood at 2.93 percent. The movement runs in the right direction, but going from 5.95 to 67 percent still means a good 61 percentage points in three weeks.

In practice that means this: if you have delegated your ADA to a DRep who stays silent on this proposal, your weight counts as a rejection even if you would back the project. The same applies to ADA sitting with an exchange and assigned to no DRep at all.

Where your wallet shows how your DRep voted

The assignment sits in your wallet. In Lace, Eternl, Yoroi or Typhon you will find the DRep your voting weight is assigned to under Governance or Voting, together with its identifier. With that identifier a blockchain explorer such as Cardanoscan or Adastat will show how the representative voted on the proposals currently open and how often they vote at all. A delegation can be changed at any time, and it costs no more than the usual network fee of a few cents.

One distinction matters here: delegating your voting right is not the same as delegating to a stake pool. You can assign both separately, and both can be changed separately. Your ADA never leave your wallet in either case, and the yield from the stake pool continues regardless of governance. What ADA staking currently pays is set out in our comparison of staking platforms.

What has changed since our article of October 29

On October 29 we described ADA at $0.1979 and below its 200-day line, which stood at $0.2100 at the time. Little has moved in the chart since. The price today is $0.1938, 2.1 percent lower than two days ago, the $0.20 mark has still not been reclaimed, and over the week ADA is down 5.5 percent. Over 30 days the figure is 20.9 percent.

What has changed is the reason a holder would need to act this week. Two days ago it was the price; today it is a deadline with a fixed date. ADA's market capitalisation stands at $7.28 billion and daily turnover at around $160 million. Measured against those figures, the proposal's 9.6 million ADA, worth around $1.86 million at today's rate, are not a meaningful quantity for the price itself. The significance of the proposal lies not in selling pressure but in the question of whether the treasury is still able to act at all.

The spending cap makes every single vote weigh more

Then there is the frame this proposal sits in. On October 17 we reported that 91.5 percent of the applicable spending cap has been allocated and that 42.6 million ADA remain free beneath it. This proposal's 9.6 million ADA would therefore be a good fifth of the room that is left. Every vote this autumn decides not just on a single project but on what the narrow remainder gets spent on.

A second proposal is running in parallel: the vote on roughly 22 million ADA for a tokenised copper reserve, which we covered on October 24. Together the two clearly exceed the cap that remains. On the arithmetic alone, both cannot pass in full, and that is an argument individual DReps name explicitly in their reasoning.

Governance Hour on November 5: the next date before the deadline

One more date stands in the calendar before the deadline. A Governance Hour on the PFMS proposal is scheduled for Thursday, November 5, 2026, at which the applicants will answer questions. Sessions of that kind have in the past been the point at which larger DReps settled their position. Anyone wanting to know whether the proposal can still reach the threshold will get the most reliable interim reading there before November 20.

Voting changes nothing about the holding period: the tax frame

A question that comes up with every governance action: does voting, or switching your DRep, trigger anything for tax purposes in Germany? No. In neither case does any ADA leave your wallet, there is no disposal, and the one-year holding period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act keeps running unchanged. The only cost is the network fee of a few cents.

Staking rewards, which many ADA holders collect alongside, are a different matter. Rewards of that kind count as other income and are assessed at their value at the time they arrive, not at their value at the end of the year. With the rate around $0.19 that value comes out correspondingly low in these weeks, which dampens the tax burden on ongoing rewards. We have gathered the state of the political debate on the holding period in our overview of the holding period reform.

Our editorial view: turnout is the real problem

Our reading: this proposal will fail on turnout, not on opposition. The figures point that way. With 5.95 percent in favour against 4.80 percent opposed, the camp of declared opponents is small, and the gap to 67 percent consists almost entirely of silence. Going from 2.93 percent on October 24 to 5.95 percent on October 28 works out at roughly 0.75 percentage points a day. At that pace a good 22 percent would be reached by November 20, about a third of what is needed.

Against that, votes of this kind on Cardano have tended to pick up in the final days before a deadline, when large DReps pool their votes, and the Governance Hour on November 5 exists for exactly that purpose. None of this can be settled today. What can be stated is this: a network in which almost nine out of ten voting rights stay silent has a participation problem bigger than any single proposal about what 9.6 million ADA get spent on. This is expressly not a recommendation to buy or sell, and a total loss remains possible with any crypto investment.

PFMS vote: turnout is what counts until November 20

Three steps make sense before the deadline:

1. Look up your delegation. Open your wallet and check under Governance which DRep your voting weight is assigned to. If nothing is listed there, your weight counts automatically against the proposal. If your ADA sit with an exchange, establish whether they can take part in governance there at all; our comparison of regulated exchanges shows which providers operate with a MiCA licence in the EU.
2. Keep staking and governance apart. These are two separate delegations with nothing to do with one another. First look up your DRep's identifier on a blockchain explorer and check whether it votes on open proposals at all; a representative silent for months is not managing your weight, it is parking it. Separately from that, check whether your yield is still competitive; our comparison of staking platforms sets the terms side by side.
3. Record inflows for tax. Every staking credit counts at its value on the day it arrives, and with the rate around $0.19 clean record-keeping pays off right now. Our comparison of tax software lists the providers that log Cardano staking automatically.

(As of October 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)