Input Output, the primary engineering organization behind Cardano, has outlined a major consensus upgrade designed to dramatically boost the network’s transaction capacity.
The project, known as Leios, is led by Carlos López De Lara, product manager at Input Output since 2020. It aims to lift Cardano’s current throughput to levels that could support 200 kilobytes of transactions per second or more under optimized parameters. That upgrade offers a potential 10- to 65-fold improvement over the current, roughly equivalent to handling just a few kilobytes of transactions per second in sustained conditions.
The upgrade builds on the existing Ouroboros Praos consensus rather than replacing it, preserving the chain’s core security and decentralization properties while introducing endorser blocks and committee-based validation for greater efficiency.
López De Lara described the effort as a multi-team undertaking that touches nearly every aspect of the Cardano node. Work spans cryptography for new key structures, networking protocols for faster block diffusion, ledger updates, consensus engine rewrites, and supporting interfaces, including the node API and command-line tools.
A code audit of cryptographic components is already underway.
 
The current budget cycle, ending in June 2026, will deliver an early public testnet with an alpha implementation. The newly proposed phase for the 2026/27 cycle shifts focus to maturing the prototype into production-grade code suitable for mainnet deployment. This includes advancing through higher software readiness levels, extensive parameter experimentation to balance performance and security, continuous load testing, and adversarial red-teaming exercises.
Success, according to López De Lara, means delivering a stable Cardano node version capable of running Leios, along with comprehensive documentation, stakeholder workshops for stake pool operators and developers, and all governance artifacts needed to enable a future hard fork. Input Output is requesting ₳27,714,342 ADA from the Cardano treasury to fund the work.
The upgrade addresses both immediate limitations and long-term sustainability. Network congestion has occasionally surfaced during high-profile events such as NFT launches or token distributions, highlighting capacity constraints for broader adoption in decentralized finance and real-world assets.
That said, as the treasury reserve continues to decline and eventually approaches zero, the network must increasingly rely on transaction fees to sustain stake pool operators and infrastructure. Higher throughput is considered essential to generating sufficient fee revenue without compromising participants’ economic viability.
Leios forms the cornerstone of Cardano’s 2030 vision, which targets scaling 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 position the network with substantially greater headroom for growth in total value locked, user activity, and overall ecosystem revenue.
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