IOG’s “No” vote on the liquidity proposal rests on a technical but foundational rule in Article III, Section 5 of the Constitution. The article requires every governance action to publish a URL for its off-chain documentation and to record, on-chain, the cryptographic hash of that file. The hash is supposed to guarantee that no one can quietly swap the PDF or JSON once voting begins.
In the liquidity proposal the two values diverged. Input Output Global’s engineers downloaded the file and calculated a Blake2b-256 digest. The hash embedded in the transaction, however, was different. That mismatch “renders the proposal unconstitutional in its current form,” IOG argued, because voters cannot be sure what they are really approving.
By contrast, the “Cardano Blockchain Ecosystem Budget: Amaru 2025” sailed through IOG’s review. The project seeks ₳1.5 million to finance an alternative Cardano node implementation written in Rust. Governance Space records show the action is already pulling in more than 90 percent “Yes” support from voting stake—well above the 50 percent threshold that treasury-related actions must clear.
The only caveat IOG raised concerns the line-item for “Ad-hoc mercenaries” to cover audits—an ambiguous phrase that the company says should be clarified before disbursement.
Under Cardano’s CIP-1694 governance flow, DReps have until epoch 563 (June 8) to vote. If the DeFi Liquidity action retains its flawed metadata, it will almost certainly be tossed regardless of the tally. The Amaru budget, on the other hand, is on track for approval; once ratified, its maintainers will be able to draw down funds in tranches, subject to on-chain spending scripts and oversight from PRAGMA’s legal wrapper.
The episode underscores why the Constitution’s seemingly dry formatting rules matter. Without an anchor-hash match, the “single source of truth” principle that keeps Cardano proposals immutable collapses, opening the door to bait-and-switch edits that no chain audit could detect. As IOG’s post put it, the mismatch “undermines the constitutional requirement for a clear, verifiable, and identical link between the on-chain governance action and its off-chain specification.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.69.
