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Input Output, the primary engineering organization behind Cardano, has outlined a major consensus upgrade designed to increase the network’s transaction capacity significantly.
The project, known as Leios, is led by Carlos López De Lara, product manager at Input Output since 2020. The upgrade is intended to lift Cardano’s current throughput to levels that could support 200 kilobytes of transactions per second or more under optimized parameters. López De Lara described this as a potential 10- to 65-fold improvement over the network’s current performance, which is roughly equivalent to handling just a few kilobytes of transactions per second in sustained conditions.
Leios is designed to build on the existing Ouroboros Praos consensus rather than replacing it. The plan is to preserve Cardano’s core security and decentralization while introducing endorser blocks and committee-based validation to improve efficiency.
López De Lara said the work is a multi-team effort that affects nearly every aspect of the Cardano node. It includes cryptography for new key structures, networking protocol changes for faster block diffusion, ledger updates, rewrites to the consensus engine, and supporting interfaces such as the node API and command-line tools.
A code audit of the cryptographic components is already underway.
The current budget cycle, ending in June 2026, will deliver an early public testnet with an alpha implementation. A subsequent phase for the 2026/27 cycle would focus on maturing the prototype into production-grade code suitable for mainnet deployment.
That later phase includes advancing through higher software readiness levels, extensive parameter experimentation to balance performance and security, continuous load testing, and adversarial red-teaming exercises.
Input Output is requesting ₳27,714,342 ADA from the Cardano treasury to fund the work.
According to López De Lara, success means delivering a stable Cardano node version capable of running Leios, along with comprehensive documentation. The plan also includes stakeholder workshops for stake pool operators and developers, and all governance artifacts needed to enable a future hard fork.
The upgrade is positioned as addressing both immediate limitations and long-term sustainability. Network congestion has appeared during high-profile events such as NFT launches or token distributions, underscoring capacity constraints for broader adoption in decentralized finance and real-world assets.
As the treasury reserve declines and eventually approaches zero, the network would need to rely more heavily on transaction fees to sustain stake pool operators and infrastructure. Higher throughput is presented as essential to generating sufficient fee revenue without undermining participants’ economic viability.
Leios is described as a cornerstone of Cardano’s 2030 vision. The target is to scale monthly transaction volumes from around 800,000 today to more than 27 million while maintaining economic self-sufficiency. If approved and executed, the initiative would aim to provide substantially greater headroom for growth in total value locked, user activity, and ecosystem revenue.
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