The founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, used his Livestream of May 1, 2025 to reveal the first quantitative performance figures for Ouroboros Leios, the upgrading of the protocol which-if it behaves in production such as the protocol, a simulation protocol, an infinitely evolving protocol, an One-Minus-Delta protocol. “”
Ouroboros Leios: The most daring update in Cardano to date
Speaking of Colorado, Hoskinson described Leios as the most ambitious iteration of the hemoboros search line: a telescoping design which “extends the catch -up” can “collapse in the current protocol” if an unforeseen fault occurs. Unlike autonomous Byzantine-Faut (BFT), Leios is designed to pile up on the major cardano assistance book without abandoning the Byzantine resistance of 50% original or the 24/7 liveliness guarantees of the network.
Hoskinson shared a single slide from the prototyping team that drew the attention of the community. Measuring the metric was the input block rate (IB), a new adjustable parameter which multiplies the flow by inserting many “input blocks” in parallel before each classification block is elected.
“With a single entry block, you can see that the maximum is about 6 TPS,” he said, pointing the graph. “You have five entry blocks, 10 entrance blocks, 20, 30 to 11,000 TP for your minimum (250 bytes), maximum 180 (TPS) at 16,000 kilobbytes, which are huge.”
Since the number of IBs is a parameter, network governors will be able to increase or lower each “check” period, then devote a “tick” period later to software and network optimizations before putting the dial. In Hoskinson’s words, “Cardano year by year becomes naturally faster and it does not require a whole new design or a protocol for that.”
Leios is the most invasive change of the Haskell node since the 2020 of Ouroboros-Bft to Shelley Consensus. The upgrade touchs almost all subsystems: logic of the big book, block structure, network battery, consensus rules and cryptography. A “monitoring” development calendar – multiple teams relying code in time zones – will be adopted to compress market times despite a higher cost and developer’s fatigue.
When will Leios be shipped?
Hoskinson warned that rewriting is not trivial: “It is generally necessary about nine months to twelve months of effort to implement a SIP to put it in the protocol.” The formal specifications, the simulations and the Cardano improvement proposal (SIP) should be completed “the second half of this year”. Once these artifacts exist, the global entry (IOG) will issue a request for proposals to external companies to co -give the code in Haskell – and potentially in Rust and GO if alternative customers mature over time.
Leios arrives next to a roadmap separated from layer 2 technologies – Hydra, Mithril, optimistic roll -ups from Midgard and the Récursiv -Snark initiative – each designed to compose the flow without compromising decentralization. Hoskinson stressed that the UTXO model makes cardano only capable of incorporating zero knowledge of knowledge: “Each outing can be proof as opposed to a transaction.”
The strategy consists in allowing Leios to provide a height of the base layer while the layer-2 add specialized scalability paths, positioning the network together to absorb “the enormous volume of transaction that Bitcoin Defi, XRP Defi and us becoming an AVS system” could generate.
Hoskinson closed by reiterating ethics focused on the search for Cardano: “Nobody in the cryptocurrency industry writes a SIP, has dense simulations and prototyping, and a formal specification as a definition of a DP. No one does this. ” Leios, he said, is the “realization of ten years and more of reflection, research and prudent engineering … The cornerstone of the Ouroboros agenda”.
If the delivery calendar is valid, the stakeholders of Cardano could vote on the SIP of Leios at the beginning of 2026, which leads to a live flow of at least 11,000 transactions per second – without abandoning the signature model of the platform – before the end of next year.
At the time of the press, Ada exchanged $ 0.71.
Star image created with dall.e, tradingView.com graphic
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