Cardano is preparing a layer 1 upgrade that it says will increase mainnet throughput from around 10 to 15 transactions per second to hundreds, while preserving the network’s decentralization and security profile. At a community event in Tokyo during the Midnight Japan Tour, Input Output’s Michael Smolenski and Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, presented Ouroboros Leios as both a scaling milestone and a broader consensus breakthrough.
Smolenski, Cardano Core product manager at Input Output, told attendees that Leios is “an upgrade to Layer 1 to make Cardano faster,” with active development underway and a target release “this year in 2026.” He described the current throughput cap as adequate to prove the design of Ouroboros, but insufficient for the next phase of adoption and for the economics of stake pool operators (SPOs).
Cardano’s Leios eyes 50x speed increase in 2026
“Until now, the network speed was around (…) 10 to 15 transactions per second,” Smolenski said. “But now we need to move to higher transaction throughput in order to be competitive and drive further adoption. Another factor, SPOs, in the long run need to bear the cost of their operations from transaction fees rather than block rewards (…) they need to see network utilization of around 50 transactions per second.”
The initial Leios mainnet release is billed as a “50x improvement,” with Smolenski translating this into a rapid jump from around 10 TPS to around 500 TPS. Rather than sticking to transactions per second as the primary metric, he emphasized “transaction kilobytes per second” to account for different transaction sizes, calling out a goal of “300 transaction kilobytes per second” and a confirmation window “between 20 and 80 seconds,” based on the prototype results.
Smolenski described Leios as Cardano’s “next generation consensus protocol,” built around additional block types. “There’s a new block. It’s called an endorser block,” he said, adding that existing blocks would be called “filing blocks.” The practical consequence, he says, is the ability to “consolidate a lot more transactions” by grouping them into endorser blocks, alongside other prioritization mechanisms that he didn’t detail on stage.
He also emphasized that scaling will be gradual to avoid overburdening node operators. The team plans to demonstrate higher throughput in stages, first targeting 500 TPS on the mainnet, then proving 1,000 TPS in the near term, with a final ambition of 10,000 TPS. “We cannot start from where we are … and go up to 10,000 transactions per second because it has to be done strategically,” Smolenski said, repeatedly emphasizing the need to “bring SPOs with us.”
Regarding the timeline, he said a first public Leios testnet was planned “at the end of the second quarter of this year”, before a hard fork of the mainnet.
Hoskinson: “Not just TPS,” but the trilemma
Hoskinson expanded the framework, positioning Leios as the culmination of a decade-long research and engineering pipeline. “Ouroboros Leios did not start in 2026 (…) Leios actually started in 2016, 10 years ago,” he said, describing “more than two dozen papers,” “dozens of protocols” and contributions spanning “more than 15 engineering companies” and “168 scientists over a 10-year period.”
“The reason Leios is special is that it’s not TPS,” Hoskinson said. “This is actually a resolution to the hardest problem in consensus and blockchain, the blockchain trilemma (…) you have decentralization, you have security and you have scalability (…) we are told you can only choose two.” He then made the main claim: “This protocol is decentralized, secure and fast. »
Notably, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also said that the blockchain trilemma has been effectively solved, as he did just a few weeks ago.
Hoskinson also argued that the design is designed to degrade safely. “If the protocol fails, the protocol fails to what we have today. It collapses into Ouroboros Praos,” he said, referring to an earlier network incident that he called a soft fork in which “Cardano split into two networks” and later “came together on its own.”
In the same remarks, Hoskinson repeatedly returns to governance capacity as a long-term advantage, suggesting that purely technical differentiation is transitory. He highlighted Cardano’s on-chain governance and treasury – “a billion dollars (…) that you control (…) ADA holders,” he said – as a mechanism to fund upgrades and coordinate changes over time.
At press time, ADA was trading at $0.2638.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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