Leios will bring “Solana Style Speed”

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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed new details about Cardano’s next major scalability upgrade, Leios, positioning it as a game-changing protocol enhancement designed to provide “Sorana-style speed” without sacrificing the project’s core commitment to the project and forming the project’s core commitment.

“Leios will give us Solana-style speed, but there is no full decentralization, no stalls,” Hoskinson said, in a sharp contrast to Solana’s performance profile.

With Leios, Cardano tries to do other things that Layer 1 hasn’t been possible so far: combining throughput that can compete with Solana with operational uptime and matching (or over-Bitcoin’s) decentralization.

What is Cardano’s Leios?

Leios is part of Cardano’s multi-tube scaling strategy, aiming to increase the throughput of the underlying layer through parallel validation and execution processes, efficient processing of transaction inputs, and a more flexible Mempool design. It builds on the fundamentals of Cardano’s data model extension UTXO (EUTXO), which enhances Bitcoin’s original UTXO model with smart contract capabilities.

Leios is tightly integrated with input spokespersons, a parallel pipeline that separates transaction propagation from block validation, allowing the network to process multiple transactions in parallel while maintaining deterministic sorting and consensus security. Essentially, Leios is an execution layer upgrade that enables fast transaction processing without compromising the ultimate or decentralization.

“It’s not just about throughput,” Hoskinson stressed. “You can have all the TPS in the world, but if there are only a few people running everything on Amazon’s web services, that’s not decentralization. We want to do that right.”

Solana made headlines for its blistering speed and ultra-low transaction costs. However, it has also experienced 13 major power outages since it started in 2020. Critics argue that Solana’s validator requirements (high hardware specifications and dependency on a few operators) (including improved decentralization and resilience).

Hoskinson positioned this contrast as Cardano as a more resilient, dispersed alternative: “There are no stalls,” he said explicitly. “Cardano has been running for nearly seven years 24/7 without a minute downtime. It’s not by chance – it’s because we took some time to build it right from scratch.”

Don’t like Solana

Leios aims to match Solana’s speeds, but does not introduce concentrated volumes or risk downtime. Combining upcoming technologies such as Hydra (Cardano’s Layer 2 State Channel System) and Midgard (an optimistic rolling platform), Leios forms a key pillar in the modular scaling stack designed to meet future user and institutional needs.

According to Hoskinson, Cardano is not only designed to perform performance parity with faster chains, but also keeps it in mind that it has resilience, governance and self-claim establishment.

Hoskinson quoted Edward’s Power Index, saying Cardano is the first-tier dispersion in today’s industry. The platform has over 1,000 DREPs (authorized representatives) under its chain politics framework, “He quips, twice as much as the U.S. Congress, is a community-strengthened chain constitution and has received an 85% approval rate.

The network also maintains a $1.5 billion Treasury, controlled by the community and is dedicated to ecosystem development, protocol upgrades and strategic investments. “We will be close to completing the roadmap we set 10 years ago. Tools are about to go online and the Treasury ensures that we can move strategically without having to succumb to VC pressure or company shareholders.”

Bitcoin Defi

In the same interview, Hoskinson detailed Cardano’s growing role in the emerging Bitcoin-type ecosystem, positioning it as a computing layer that can operate under the security guarantee of Bitcoin. Thanks to Babel fees, users can pay transaction costs to BTC when running smart contracts on Cardano.

“We’re best suited to one category in many different approaches. We predict that UTXO Defi and Bitcoin Defi suddenly become a thing. We’re the first system to build that infrastructure. We’re going to be a great layer of Bitcoin Defi.”

Cardano’s architecture opens the door to blockchain becoming a central liquidity and execution hub for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and other UTXO-based assets, an ecosystem merged with Ethereum and Solana with higher market cap and liquidity statistics. “Cardano has a great chance to be a link to the entire UTXO Defi ecosystem,” Hoskinson said. “And, once Bitcoin Defi is open, it will — ETFs, institutions and hundreds of millions of users will follow.”

Hoskinson’s speech also raised ongoing criticism that Cardano lacked the “hype cycle” of other chains, or that did not generate glitz-free defi tvl numbers. “Year by year, our DAPP number is growing. TVL is doubling every year. Transaction volume is increasing. Our major security incidents are zero,” he said. “But because we are not chasing memes or pumping VC tokens, people say we don’t matter. It’s frustrating.”

He believes speculative trends, such as meme coins or the creation of agricultural enthusiasts, may attract temporary attention but rarely bring lasting value. By contrast, Cardano is building systems that support real-world assets and regulate financial and public infrastructure use cases.

At press time, the ADA traded at $0.6595.

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