Governance Actions

Pebble & Ecosystem maintenance: TypeScript core of Cardano

Treasury withdrawal: Pays ADA out of the Cardano treasury.

Status
Enacted: Approved and in effect.
Proposed
4 May 2026, in epoch 629
Amount
₳4,600,000
Action ID
gov_action1ggr2uz7prwn5l84cdn2krwngfez0p7wluy4u3u3ez9pz5ls2whesqnsjly8

Votes

  • DReps: 69.3% yes, 67% needed, threshold reached, 112 Yes · 28 No · 18 Abstain.
  • Stake pools: do not vote on this action.
  • Constitutional Committee: 85.7% yes.

Abstract

Harmonic Laboratories (HLabs for short) is an R&D firm born and focused solely on the Cardano ecosystem.

Harmonic Laboratories supports and maintains a considerable portion of the TypeScript tooling for the Cardano ecosystem, which the majority of Cardano developers use, either directly, or indirectly via other libraries that depend on code written and maintained by HLabs.

The mission of HLabs is for true decentralization to become the baseline of application development, not only a nice-to-have feature.

This proposal funds two complementary engineering tracks:

- **[Pebble](https://github.com/HarmonicLabs/pebble)**: the first production-ready imperative smart-contract language on Cardano. Pebble brings to UPLC a programming paradigm Aiken structurally cannot deliver, ships a TypeScript-shaped surface syntax that the largest developer community on earth already uses, and (per HLabs' published benchmarks) produces on-chain code that strictly outperforms Aiken and is competitive with Plutarch, while remaining dramatically more readable than either. - **Tooling maintenance**: keeping HLabs' TypeScript stack (`cardano-ledger-ts`, `ouroboros-miniprotocols-ts`, `plutus-machine`, `uplc`, etc.) synchronized with protocol upgrades. This stack is not optional infrastructure: it is what production projects across the ecosystem already depend on, including [Mesh](https://meshjs.dev/), [Lucid Evolution](https://github.com/Anastasia-Labs/lucid-evolution), and L2 systems like [Midgard](https://github.com/Anastasia-Labs/midgard). When HLabs ships a hard-fork update, the rest of the TypeScript ecosystem ships with it; when HLabs lags, every downstream project lags.

A separate proposal funds the [Gerolamo light node](https://github.com/HarmonicLabs/gerolamo) at 5 FTE and is voted on independently.

### Duration & Milestones

This proposal spans over **12 months**, throughout which there will be several deliveries and demos. Amongst the key deliveries, we note:

- maintenance for an upcoming hard fork; - a production-ready, imperative and efficient, programming language for smart contracts ([Pebble](https://github.com/HarmonicLabs/pebble)).

### Total Budget Ask

The estimated USD budget is of **`$1,000,000`** (or **`₳4,000,000`**) + 15% in refundable contingency (**`₳600,000`**); for a total ask of **`4,600,000 ADA`**.