Sundae Labs

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October 3, 2025

Catalyst Fund 14: Scooping Up Our Favorite Flavors

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Sundae Labs Team

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Intro - Why We Made This List and Why It’s Important

At SundaeSwap Labs, we’re proud to be part of the Cardano ecosystem, and we know progress depends on diverse teams collaborating. Project Catalyst embodies this by letting the community propose ideas and vote on which ones receive funding. That idea embodies Cardano’s spirit of decentralization and shared ownership.

Catalyst keeps the ecosystem moving forward. It empowers new builders to realize their visions and also provides established teams the financial resources for projects that might’ve otherwise fizzled into obscurity. Not every idea makes headlines, but a lot of them quietly make the whole system stronger.

In the past, we’ve been lucky enough to receive funding for 13 different projects. In this round, it was really important to us to give back. While we have no proposals of our own this round, we signed up as a community reviewer to support projects that push the ecosystem forward, and share the ones we think are especially worth paying attention to.

In Fund 14, over 1,600 proposals were submitted. We reviewed them and selected 25 that stood out. Three teams approached us for collaboration, and we’re eager to help bring their ideas to life. This list isn’t exhaustive, as it’s nearly impossible to thoroughly review and comment on every one of the proposals. Please don’t feel left out if we didn’t mention you, and as a voter, make sure to look for other lists with different perspectives!

Our Rationale / Thought Process

With so many proposals submitted, we had to narrow our focus, so we leaned into the areas that connect most directly with SundaeSwap’s work and experience. That means our list leans toward infrastructure, tooling, and other projects in the same broad niche we operate in.

That’s not to say that education, community events, or other categories aren’t important - far from it. There are likely dozens of excellent proposals in those spaces. They just aren’t the areas where we bring the most meaningful perspective, so they didn’t make it onto this list.

And honestly, that’s one of the strengths of Catalyst. Different people notice different things. One team might be drawn to community outreach, another to research, another to governance experiments. When all those voices come together, you get a richer, more diverse picture of what the ecosystem values. This is just our slice of it—the projects that stood out to us through the lens of our own work.

For this round of review, we focused in particular on projects we feel will help drive adoption from the bottom up: projects which seek to improve the developer experience and bring new business to building on Cardano. The easier it becomes to build on Cardano, the less we have to convince businesses to do so, and the bigger the dividends in the long term.

The Projects

Here are the projects that caught our attention this round. This isn’t a ranked list - just a handful that stood out to us in different ways.

Out of the 25 proposals that caught our interest, three are teams who have reached out to us to partner with them. These collaborations are exciting because they line up with the kinds of infrastructure SundaeSwap is working on ourselves, and they open the door to building things that none of us could accomplish alone.

The other 22 aren’t connected to us, but we think they’re doing work worth paying attention to. Some are tackling long-standing challenges in the ecosystem, while others are exploring new directions that could open up fresh opportunities.

Want the full menu? Check out our curated list of Catalyst Fund 14 proposals here

Wrapping Up

SundaeSwap doesn’t use protocol funds for voting. Any votes from SundaeSwap will be from individual team members participating as members of the community.

What we hope this post does is simple: shine a little extra light on projects we’re excited about, and encourage you to take part in Catalyst by supporting the proposals that resonate with you. That’s the whole point of Catalyst—the community has a voice, and every vote shapes the direction Cardano takes next.

And finally, a thank you to the Catalyst team. Pulling together more than 1,600 proposals is no small feat, and the Catalyst team deserves recognition not just for the effort it takes to run the process, but for the forward-thinking design of it. By making funding available in this way, Catalyst gives both new and established builders the chance to bring ideas to life that might otherwise never leave the notebook stage—and in doing so, helps shape the future of the Cardano landscape.