Cardano’s Leios Plan Sets Initial Capacity Target at Three to Five Times

Input Output’s Oct. 20 plan puts Cardano’s Leios scaling work on a staged path through the Dijkstra hard fork. Initial settings target three to five times the transaction data capacity the network handles under Praos, with at least two later increases aiming for 10 to 15 times the baseline.

The multipliers refer to transaction data per second. The comparison point is about 4.5 kilobytes per second under Praos; the figures do not promise a fixed number of transactions per second because transaction sizes vary.

Leios would add endorser blocks alongside existing Praos blocks. Stake pools in a committee vote on each endorser block before its transactions are added to the ledger. Certification requires votes representing 75% of active stake.

That threshold differs from the key-registration estimate. Pools must register BLS voting keys before Leios can operate, and keys covering roughly 90% to 95% of delegated stake will be needed. The higher estimate allows for pools that may be offline or slow to vote; the exact activation requirement is still being finalized.

The planned sequence starts with a constitutional update, followed by the Dijkstra hard fork. The fork makes the protocol available, but Leios will need pool key registration and controlled traffic tests on mainnet before capacity increases. Each later increase would use a separate parameter update rather than another hard fork.

Each later capacity increase would require approval from delegate representatives representing 67% of stake, stake pool operators representing 51% of stake and two-thirds of the Constitutional Committee.

A 41-day MusashiNet test phase reached a peak of 26.8 kilobytes of transaction data per second. It used generated traffic and had 63 registered pools. Cardano’s mainnet has roughly 2,700 registered pools, so mainnet tests will provide a separate measure of how the network performs under live conditions.

Earlier coverage of Leios’ public testing and mainnet target described the upgrade’s testing status. The Oct. 20 plan adds capacity milestones and the steps needed to reach them. Its next listed checkpoints are the constitutional update, Dijkstra hard fork, pool key registration and controlled mainnet tests; it sets no activation date.