Cardano CIP-13 (Cardano URI)

Overview

CIP-13 ("Cardano URI Scheme") is a Cardano Improvement Proposal in the Wallets category that defines a standard URI format for Cardano actions — primarily ADA payment requests and stake-pool delegation preferences — suitable for clickable links and qr-code payloads [1, 2]. The intent is that a user can click a link or scan a code and have a light wallet pre-populate the relevant fields (recipient, amount, or a delegation portfolio) rather than typing them by hand [1].

The scheme prefix is web+cardano: [1, 2]. The authors chose cardano over ada because "other projects that implement this standard tend to take the project name over the currency name," and the web+ prefix exists because browsers require a web+ (or ext+) prefix for non-whitelisted custom protocol handlers [1]. Crucially for safety, CIP-13 specifies that payment links pre-fill a transaction for review rather than executing it automatically [1].

History

CIP-13 was created 2020-09-22 by Robert Phair (cosd.com), Sebastien Guillemot, and Vicente Almonacid (both EMURGO); it is licensed CC-BY-4.0 and carries the status Proposed [1]. It is maintained in the cardano-foundation/CIPs repository, the canonical home of Cardano standards-track documents (a browsable mirror exists at cips.cardano.org) [1, 4]. The design explicitly follows Bitcoin's BIP-21 conventions, substituting bitcoin: with web+cardano: while acknowledging BIP-21's extensibility limitations [1]. The scheme has since been extended by related CIPs — e.g. CIP-0099 adds claim-link protocols under the same web+cardano:// authority space [1].

Technical specification

CIP-13 distinguishes URIs by their authority component [1]:

Payment URIs (no explicit authority)

web+cardano:<address>?<parameters>

• <address> — a Base58 or Bech32 Cardano address [1].
• amount=<decimal> — optional; specified in ADA with a period decimal separator, following BIP-21 rules [1].

Example [1]:

web+cardano:Ae2tdPwUPEZ76BjmWDTS7poTekAvNqBjgfthF92pSLSDVpRVnLP7meaFhVd

Stake-pool delegation URIs (//stake authority)

web+cardano://stake?<pool_parameters>

Pools are identified either by a 56-hex-digit pool ID or by a 3–5 character pool ticker [1]. When multiple pools are listed, query values express proportional weighting for splitting stake; a missing proportion defaults to 1, and for a single pool the proportion is ignored [1]:

web+cardano://stake?c94e6fe1123bf111b77b57994bcd836af8ba2b3aa72cfcefbec2d3d4
web+cardano://stake?POOL1=3.14159&POOL2=2.71828
web+cardano://stake?COSD

Other protocols

Additional authorities are reserved for sibling CIPs, e.g. CIP-0099 claim links of the form web+cardano://claim/v1?faucet_url=...&code=... [1].

Use cases

• Donations / payment requests: embed web+cardano:<address>?amount=... in a webpage link or qr-code so a supporter can pay with one click/scan [1].
• Delegation portfolios: a stake-pool operator or community can publish a //stake link that pre-loads a weighted set of pools into the user's wallet, lowering the friction of delegation [1].
• Wallet interoperability: a single link works across any CIP-13-aware wallet rather than tying users to one app [1, 3].

Implementations

• cardano-foundation/CIPs — the specification repository (markdown), actively maintained with bi-weekly editor meetings [1, 4].
• Yoroi and Begin Wallet support CIP-13 payment URIs; stake-pool URI support was still listed as pending as of the spec's implementation notes [1].
• CIP-0099 claim-link support (same scheme family) is implemented by Yoroi, Begin Wallet, and VESPR [1].
• A community glossary by NMKR documents CIP-13's role in the Cardano wallet ecosystem [3].

Comparison

Versus a bare Cardano address QR (address only), CIP-13 adds an optional amount and, distinctively, a //stake delegation mode that no Bitcoin-style address scheme has — encoding governance/staking intent rather than a payment [1]. Relative to Stellar's stellar-sep-7, CIP-13 is simpler and carries no requester authentication (no signed-origin equivalent), relying instead on the wallet pre-filling-and-confirming model and on user vigilance against phishing [1]. It shares the BIP-21 lineage and the web+ browser-handler convention with Stellar's scheme, but its payload set is narrower (payment + delegation) than TON's binary-payload deep links (ton-transfer-uri) or XRPL's multi-type request URIs (xrpl-request-uri) [1].

Status

Proposed. CIP-13 is an accepted, numbered CIP that is implemented by some production wallets for payments, with stake-pool URI support partial; it has not been promoted beyond "Proposed" status in the CIP process [1, 2].

Sources

1 CIP-0013: Cardano URI Scheme — Cardano Foundation, 2020 2 CIP-0013 | Cardano URI Scheme — cips.cardano.org, 2026 3 What is CIP-13 in Cardano? — NMKR, 2026 4 cardano-foundation/CIPs — GitHub, 2026

Deployments

No country reports mention this standard by name.

Regions / aggregations not mapped to a single country

• Universal