Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson signaled renewed momentum behind Leios, the network’s next major consensus upgrade, as Input Output moved a ¥27.7 million funding proposal toward DRep approval. The proposal seeks to evolve Leios from an early public testnet prototype to a mainnet-ready release candidate, making the upgrade a key part of Cardano’s 2030 scaling strategy.
“Leos is coming” Hoskinson books On X, citing Sebastian Nagel, who said: “Cardano, if your government allows it, we will ship Leios.” The short exchange formed the framework for the next phase of Cardano Expanding the scope of the roadmap As a technical delivery matter and governance decision.
The biggest bet for scaling is Cardano
the an offerauthored by Carlos López de Lara and Nagel, asks DReps to agree to draw down the treasury in the amount of ₳27,714,342 to finance six to nine months of development. The work aims to Leios transferred from the current prototype The testnet phase towards releasing a candidate suitable for mainnet integration. According to the proposal, each teacher will be independently guaranteed, while unspent ADA will be returned to the treasury.
Leios is designed to enhance, rather than replace, Ouroboros Praos, Cardano’s current consensus protocol. The proposal says the upgrade introduces validator blocks and committee-based validation to increase transaction capacity while maintaining Prowse’s security model. IO frames the design as a way to scale Cardano without undermining decentralization or making stake pooling operations economically unviable.
“Cardano needs a step change in throughput to meet its 2030 ambitions, and Leios is how it will get there. This proposal funds the path from public testnet to mainnet-ready release candidate – providing 10–65x increase in transaction capacity“, the proposal states. “Why this volume matters: Cardano’s 2030 strategy targets growth from approximately 800,000 monthly transactions to more than 27 million transactions.”
This 2030 target is a key justification for requesting funding. The proposal argues that sustained use at this level would require at least 6x the current capacity, while Leios is expected to deliver 10x or more under validated parameter settings. Elsewhere, the accompanying I/O article says that Leios can support a gradual increase in throughput from 2x to 30x current capacity on the mainnet, with full capacity demonstrated on the testnet before wider deployment.
The work is organized around three objectives. The first is a release candidate, including a substantial rewrite of consensus components, implementation of the Dijkstra-era Leios block structure, compatibility testing against the official Agda specification, and integration into the core node by Q4 2026.
The second is “High Confidence,” built through parameter exploration, ongoing load testing, adversarial testing, red teaming exercises, and an updated threat model. The third is hard fork enablement, which covers client interfaces, technical documentation, SPO and developer workshops, and support for adjacent infrastructure such as DB-Sync, Mithril, Frost blockTestnet hard forks, administrative tools, and emergency procedures.
The proposal takes care to separate work within the IO’s control from external dependencies. The hard fork of the mainnet will still depend on the readiness of the broader ecosystem, the introduction of governance measures, and community votes. The document clearly describes these as risks, not promises.
Funding will be managed through Intersect’s treasury reserve smart contract framework, with milestone-based disbursements and third-party guarantee. The budget allocates ¥23.83 million, or 86%, for development, with smaller portions allocated to infrastructure, security, audit, legal and compliance costs, ecosystem support, operations, governance and other costs.
The risk department is live. It identifies community readiness, hard fork timing, eventual integration of the Cardano node, and potential governance restrictions as factors that may delay or limit activation. It also points to technical limitations, including the potentially higher operational costs of SPOs, increased chain growth, and high-yield assumptions associated with conflicting stake conditions.
At press time, ADA was trading at $0.2661.
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