Cardano Closes in on Solana’s Speed: Charles Hoskinson Reveals Leios Prototyping Underway
Charles Hoskinson has confirmed Cardano's Ouroboro Leios protocol is being prototyped. | Credit: Hameem Sarwar/ CCN.
Key Takeaways
- First outlined in 2022, Cardano’s Ouroboros Leios protocol is expected to dramatically increase the blockchain’s throughput.
- In a recent X post, Charles Hoskinson confirmed that IOHK has been prototyping Leios designs.
- He said Leios will make Cardano “faster than Solana.”
Whether measured by maximum theoretical transactions per second (TPS), average daily TPS, or time to finality, Cardano’s speed has fallen behind more recently launched blockchains like Solana. However, a long-awaited Cardano scaling solution known as Leios could help close the gap.
The only problem is that since Cardano developer Input-Output (IOHK) published the Leios white paper in 2022, it appears to have made little progress in implementing the upgrade.
However, founder Charles Hoskinson said that the company has been busy prototyping behind the scenes and plans to “dramatically scale” its efforts in the next quarter.
Scaling Cardano With Ouroboros Leios
Proposed as an upgrade to Cardano’s Ouroboros consensus algorithm, Leios is designed to increase the network’s throughput without sacrificing security or decentralization.
A key component of the Cardano upgrade is support for parallel transaction processing, where different nodes in the network can mint and validate input blocks independently. This decoupling of transaction processing from consensus will enable the blockchain to handle more transactions simultaneously.
Leios also introduces mechanisms to optimize data availability by allowing Input Block headers (i.e., metadata) to be transmitted independently from the full block bodies (i.e., actual transaction data). This structure ensures that consensus can be achieved on the validity of blocks without requiring the entire network to process all transactions in real-time.
Impact on Cardano
Once Leios goes live, Cardano’s TPS rate is expected to increase from less than 20 today to 1,500 or higher , depending on specific parameters.
For comparison, Solana typically processes around 3,000 transactions per second and has a theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS. (However, this comparison is limited as Cardano can handle multi-input/output transactions in a single block, making the raw TPS number less representative of real-world performance.)
While Ouroboros Leios is designed to maximize throughput, another upgrade, known as Ouroboros Peras, is focused on enabling rapid transaction finalization.
Leios’ increased throughput and Peras’ faster time to finality will create a more powerful blockchain capable of handling more transactions per second while ensuring rapid confirmation. This performance boost could be critical for Cardano.
As explored in CCN’s report, the blockchain has struggled to keep pace with some of its peers. It has less developer activity, fewer active addresses, dwindling transaction volume, and a token that recently fell out of the top ten cryptocurrencies.
Is Cardano a Dead Chain? ADA Analysis Suggests Network May Never Deliver on Potential
Progress on Ouroboros Upgrades
Although no specific release date has been announced, an update from IOHK in May indicates that the consensus team has been actively refining Peras to improve performance and efficiency.
As for Leios, in an X post on Sunday, Sept. 15, Hoskinson said “an active prototyping team” is working on the project, which he boasted would make Cardano “faster than Solana.”
Is Cardano a Dead Chain? ADA Analysis Suggests Network May Never Deliver on Potential
