Charles Hoskinson says Cardano is now on a defined, accelerated path to its most ambitious performance leap yet. In an August 31 AMA, the Cardano founder highlighted an open-for-review Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP) for Leios—a staged implementation plan that, in its first iteration, targets a 30× to 65× throughput increase while preserving Cardano’s determinism and UTXO model. “The throughput increases if Leios is implemented 30 to 65x,” Hoskinson said, adding that time-to-market is “about 1 to 1.5 years,” a compressed window he contrasted with a two-and-a-half to three-year timeline for a full, unsimplified build.
Hoskinson framed Leios as the anchor of a long-arc scaling agenda designed to push Cardano from consensus-bound ceilings toward network-bound ceilings. “The goal is to get a one-minus-delta protocol where you’re no longer consensus constrained but rather you’re network constrained,” he said. The initial design intentionally trims complexity relative to the research blueprint so client teams can co-develop and ship something “that massively improves the state of affairs” and can be upgraded iteratively thereafter.
The execution model is as noteworthy as the technical plan. Hoskinson said Input Output has already begun provisioning a ‘follow-the-sun’ development cadence so “development occurs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” with AI-assisted hand-offs to “massively improve developer velocity and also code quality.” That process focus is meant to compress the 12–18 month delivery window without sacrificing reliability.
Architecturally, Hoskinson positioned Leios as a drop-in operating mode that cooperates with the current Ouroboros stack rather than replacing it wholesale. “It knows how to plug into our goals with Paris for fast finality. It knows how to plug into fee markets. It knows how to plug into Chronos, which will come later for timekeeping. It knows how to plug into the partner-chains ecosystem. It knows how to plug into Hydra,” he said. Importantly, if the new mode encounters problems, the network can fail back to the existing consensus path, preserving liveness: “When Leios fails, it fails back to Praos… Praos becomes the emergency mode of the network and Leios becomes the operating mode of the network.”
Hoskinson stressed that Cardano’s core execution model remains intact. “What’s nice is we didn’t have to change UTXO. We didn’t have to change any of the fundamental assumptions of the system,” he said. “For the most part, all intents and purposes, transaction determinism is preserved.” By avoiding a wholesale ledger redesign, the team expects to minimize disruption for builders while still unlocking headroom for demand.
For now, the message is focus and speed. “This is the hardest thing we’ve ever done as an ecosystem,” Hoskinson said, “but it puts us in a really good position.” The priority is to finalize the specification with client teams and ship the first step on an aggressive clock. “We’ve never moved this fast in the history of Cardano,” he said. “We basically want to write code on the weekends… during the night… during the day.” And the end-state remains unambiguous: “We’re very convinced that the Leios program as it evolves over time will basically keep the Cardano network relevant forever.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.83.
