Cella

Open-source, self-hostable infrastructure for Cardano Constitutional Committee (CC) governance.

Cella gives Constitutional Committee members and consortia a single workflow for their on-chain duties: ingest governance actions, assess constitutionality with LLM assistance and other checks, deliberate with members, vote internally, author the committee's final rationale, and package and submit the vote and rationale on-chain.

It runs standalone (no WordPress required), so any Constitutional Committee or consortium, such as Cardano Curia can self-host it.

What it does

• Ingest governance actions , pull and present on-chain governance actions for review.
• Constitutionality review , connect to large language models and other tooling to assess whether a governance action aligns with the Cardano Constitution.
• Deliberation , structured discussion among committee / consortium members.
• Internal voting , members vote internally to settle the committee's position.
• Rationale , author the committee's final, citable rationale for its vote as a CIP-136 document, with the real on-chain anchor hash.
• On-chain submission , package the vote and rationale and submit them on-chain.

The rationale is a real artifact

Cella's committee rationale is not a preview or a mock-up. Authoring one produces a genuine CIP-136 JSON-LD document, downloadable at /rationale/{action}.jsonld, and Cella shows you its anchor hash — the blake2b-256 of exactly those bytes, and precisely the value that goes on-chain with the vote:

cardano-cli hash anchor-data --file-text rationale-<action>.jsonld
# prints the same hash Cella displays

The document's internalVote block is filled from the chamber's own deliberation: each delegate voting Yes counts as constitutional, No as unconstitutional, and roster members who never took a position as didNotVote — which is how a multi-member committee shows the chain that its single vote came out of a real internal split. Delegates who recorded a position are named as the document's authors.

Cella will not hand you a document that CIP-136 would reject: an anchor hash over an incomplete rationale looks submittable when it isn't, so the download is refused until the rationale is complete.

Who it's for

Cardano Constitutional Committee members, CC consortia (such as Cardano Curia), and any governance body that needs a transparent, repeatable path from a governance action to an on-chain committee vote.

Status

Cella is being rebuilt from an existing WordPress deployment (live at cardanocuria.com) into a standalone, single-binary tool: no WordPress, no database server, no runtime dependencies. The first slice (governance-action ingest + web view) is in this repo. See MAINTAINERS.md for the roadmap.

Quickstart

Cella is a single Go binary. Build it once, then run. It creates its own local SQLite database.

git clone https://github.com/Awen-online/cella
cd cella
go mod tidy         # fetch dependencies (first build only)
go build -o cella .

./cella ingest      # pull governance actions, votes and the committee from the chain
./cella serve       # then open http://localhost:8080

Everything is a flag, so nothing needs exporting to try something:

./cella ingest -n preprod -limit 25   # the governance testnet
./cella serve  -n preprod -demo       # look around without a wallet
./cella --help                        # every flag

A flag beats an environment variable, which beats the default — so the same settings work for a person at a terminal and for a systemd unit. An unrecognised network is a startup error, never a silent mainnet.

That's the whole install. No API key is required — Koios is a public, decentralized Cardano query layer.

Try it without a wallet

Wallet sign-in is the only way into a real instance, so to look around locally without one, run in demo mode:

CELLA_DEMO=1 ./cella serve

This enables a roster picker on the entry splash that signs you in as any delegate you click, with no proof of identity at all. It exists to demonstrate the chamber. Never set it on an instance anyone else can reach: a stranger could vote in a delegate's name and author the committee's rationale, which is then anchored on-chain and cited permanently.

Running it for real

export CELLA_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32)   # signs session cookies
export CELLA_BODY=body/curia.json             # who you are — see body/curia.json
export CELLA_HOT_NFT_ADDR=addr1w...           # the committee's hot NFT script address

./cella ingest && ./cella serve

Configuration

Everything is by environment; every value has a sensible default. See .env.example for the full annotated list.

Variable	What it does
CELLA_DB	SQLite database path (default ./cella.db)
CELLA_ADDR	Listen address (default :8080)
CELLA_SECRET	Signs session cookies. Unset means a random key per start — secure, but every restart signs everyone out. Set it for any persistent deployment.
CELLA_BODY	Path to the body JSON — who this instance belongs to. A consortium or a single member; both are supported. Its logo sits as a file alongside it. See body/curia.json. Cella recognises a member by hashing the public key in their wallet signature and matching it against their registered address, so a member with no address cannot sign in. Unset, Cella uses the built-in Cardano Curia body.
CELLA_HOT_NFT_ADDR	The hot NFT script address. Its inline datum names the voting group, and therefore what quorum actually is. Cella reads this from the chain rather than trusting local config — without it, quorum is reported as unknown rather than guessed.
CELLA_DEMO	Disables authentication. Enables the roster picker. Local demos only.
CELLA_NETWORK	mainnet (default), preprod or preview. Picks the Koios endpoint and the explorer links, so a committee practising on a testnet is on that testnet everywhere. An unrecognised name is a startup error, never a silent mainnet. SanchoNet is not supported — Koios does not serve it; governance is live on Preprod.
KOIOS_URL	Override the network's Koios endpoint, for a private instance.
KOIOS_TOKEN	Optional Koios bearer token (higher rate limits).
CELLA_LLM_URL / CELLA_LLM_MODEL / CELLA_LLM_KEY	Bring-your-own model for cella review.

Tests

go test ./...            # the whole suite
go test ./... -cover     # with coverage

Two of these are worth knowing about, because they are what stop Cella from lying to a committee:

• internal/rationale hashes CIP-136's own published example document and asserts it reproduces the file hash the CIP publishes for it. If that fails, every anchor hash Cella produces is wrong.
• internal/cardano decodes a real credential-manager hot NFT datum — one whose blake2b-256 is the inline datum hash IntersectMBO publishes — and pins the quorum rule at ceil(n/2), so a group of four needs two signatures rather than the intuitive three.

Part of the Awen ecosystem

Cella is built and maintained by Awen, a studio building a federation of Web3, civic, and creative tools.

Brand & assets

Brand guidelines and logo marks live in assets/brand/. See assets/brand/BRAND.md for the full specification (color tokens, typography, components), and assets/brand/logo/ for the marks: two directions (aedicula and chamber), each in gold-leaf, gold-solid, ink, and ivory-on-forum finishes.

License

Apache-2.0.

Contributing & security

See CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, and SECURITY.md.