Applications for the autumn mentorship cohort are open until 30 September. Apply now
No DRep can be an expert in everything. The Academy teaches the concepts, frameworks, and questions that improve governance decisions.
Each track is a sequence of courses with a stated outcome. Start anywhere; nothing here is a prerequisite for membership.
CIP-1694 in practice: governance action types, voting thresholds, committee roles, and the DRep mandate.
Explain any governance action type, its threshold, and who else has a say - without looking it up.
How to read a withdrawal request, evaluate milestones, and assess cost realism against comparable programs.
Review a treasury withdrawal like an operator: costs, milestones, and what the budget does not say.
A repeatable review process: verifying claims, checking delivery history, testing assumptions, and documenting what you could not verify.
Run the same diligence process on every proposal and record what you verified and what you could not.
Ledger eras, protocol parameters, staking mechanics, and on-chain data - enough fluency to read technical proposals honestly.
Read a technical proposal and identify which claims you can check and which need an expert.
Liquidity, incentives, and market plumbing - enough fluency to assess proposals that touch DeFi without over-claiming expertise.
Spot incentive distortion and mercenary liquidity in proposals that promise ecosystem growth.
Delivery risk, custody and multisig practice, sanctions exposure, and the legal questions a representative should ask.
Assess execution and legal risk on a funding decision and name the mitigations you would require.
Working with on-chain data and program metrics: what can actually be measured, and how numbers mislead.
Design KPIs that survive contact with reality and reject metrics that cannot be verified.
Rationale writing, delegator communication, disclosure language, and handling public disagreement well.
Write a vote rationale a stranger can audit, and keep delegators informed between actions.
Search covers titles, summaries, outcomes and the topics of every source a course cites.
Showing 9 of 9 published courses
What counts as material, how to write a disclosure entry a delegator can actually use, how to choose between disclosure, abstention and recusal, and how to keep the record honest as circumstances change.
What the Cardano Constitution does and does not do, who the governance bodies are, how an action moves through its lifecycle, and how to check a proposal against the guardrail that actually applies.
How to assess execution risk fairly: reading delivery history as evidence rather than reputation, spotting key-person and vendor dependencies, issue-spotting custody and change controls, matching mitigations to the size and reversibility of the ask, and recording it all in a delivery-risk register.
How to tell whether a proposed success measure can actually be observed, attributed, defended against gaming and verified after the money is spent - and how to rewrite the ones that cannot.
One repeatable workflow applied to every proposal: scope the review and check your own conflicts, map claims to evidence, verify sources honestly, test feasibility and delivery, then steelman the proposal and publish a neutral record of questions and unknowns.
A working map of the protocol parameters, how to read a parameter change proposal line by line, what second-order effects to expect, and the point at which the honest move is to ask an expert.
Work line by line through a withdrawal request: what the budget claims, whether staffing and rates reconcile, whether milestones are verifiable, what the budget omits, and how to turn findings into public questions.
What a total-value-locked figure counts and what it hides, how liquidity differs from depth and volume, why incentivised liquidity leaves, how to evaluate an incentive proposal against a counterfactual, and the market-structure risks that sit underneath all of it.
The four traits of an auditable rationale, how to attribute evidence, how to state uncertainty without collapsing the decision, how to handle the strongest counterargument, and a drafting workshop that ends with a published, correctable document.
Every course is text-first. You work through each lesson, submit one practical exercise, and pass a final assessment. Nothing is timed and nothing is ranked.
44 lessons across 9 courses, all readable at your own pace.