- The Input Output Group is seeking 27.7 million ADA from the Cardano Treasury to fund Leios, the network’s most ambitious scalability upgrade.
- Leios aims to scale up to 30x the network’s current capacity and increase monthly transactions from 800,000 to over 27 million.
Cardano is stepping up its scalability ambitions, and with Leios, it targets a 30x increase in throughput to process over 27 million transactions monthly.
Leios is the network’s most ambitious scalability effort and aims to enhance the current consensus protocol: Ouroborous Praos. According to the Input Output Group (IOG), which is leading the charge, Praos was built for decentralization and security, and it has delivered on both. However, to become a truly global network for day-to-day use cases, Cardano requires scale, and Leios is the way to deliver it, IOG says.
Cardano, if your governance permits, we'll ship Leios.https://t.co/VLMRG9yXQR
— Sebastian Nagel (@ch1bo_) May 14, 2026
The goal is truly ambitious: with Leios, Cardano seeks to grow its monthly transaction count from 800,000 to over 27 million “while staying economically self-sufficient as Reserve diminishes.” This will be achieved through a 10–65x increase in throughput capacity, which IOG says it has already simulated in CIP-0164, an improvement proposal first revealed last August.
Since then, CIP-0164 has been merged, and early devnets with a prototype implementation are available. IOG is now working on preparing a testnet.
To deliver what comes next and make Leios a reality, the group is requesting 27,714,342 ADA from the Treasury, worth $7.3 million at current market prices. It says the disbursement will be based on set milestones and will be assured by an independent third party. It will be auditable on-chain via Intersect’s tool for tracking treasury reserves, and the network’s Oversight Committee will verify all key actions. Any undisbursed or unused ADA will be returned to the Treasury.
ADA is changing hands at $0.266 at press time. A rally triggered by the passing of the CLARITY Act by the Senate Banking Committee took the coin to an intra-day high of $0.2798. However, the momentum was short-lived, and it has since lost all these gains.
Leios Takes Cardano Toward Vision 2030
IOG has structured the Leios rollout around three key goals. The first is on the technical side; this requires a rewrite of consensus components, an implementation of the Leios block structure, and full integration into the primary node by Q4 this year.
Next comes protocol validation through adversarial and load testing on the public testnet. The hard fork rollout will be last, enabling Leios at a protocol level.
BTBF X-StakePool, a Japanese Cardano stake pool that launched in 2020, supported Leios, stating:
“I have very high expectations for Leios. As Cardano moves toward Vision 2030, we must evolve into a chain with true competitive capacity and long-term sustainability. I believe Leios is one of the most important innovations for making that possible. It has the potential to take Cardano to another level.”
IOG believes that Leios will let builders, institutions and ordinary users know that “Cardano’s infrastructure can scale with what’s being built on it.”
