2026-06-22
Block 45 and Leios
- The Ouroboros Leios testnet enters its phase the next day, with a new IO podcast, Block 45, launching to cover it.
- The testnet runs through Musashi phases, and Leios aims for about a 44x throughput increase, putting Cardano in the hundreds of TPS with a path to thousands.
- Leios is framed as solving the blockchain trilemma, scaling at 50 percent Byzantine resistance with fast finality and high decentralization, but IO cannot initiate the hard fork, the community must.
- Leios becomes a tick tock cadence like Intel, so throughput can grow every two years while extended UTXO, Hydra, and partner chains complement it.
- Bitcoin DeFi via Pogen, a Cardano DeFi kernel that routes fees into the treasury, and XRP mirroring via Flare are all in the works.
- Midnight went from a whitepaper to a launched mainnet in a year, differentiating ADA from ETH and Bitcoin and inviting more partner chains.
27 entries
IO launched a new podcast, Block 45, with Lilly and Paul, whose inaugural episode is about Ouroboros Leios.
Ouroboros Leios enters its testnet phase the next day, structured around the Musashi phases of earth, water, fire, wind, and void.
Earth validates linear Leios, a fast, easy to implement divergence from the paper, then later phases tune parameters and run adversarial testing.
Cardano runs at about 4.5 transactions per kilobyte per second, and Leios targets around 200, roughly a 44x increase into the hundreds of TPS.
The network runs under 20 percent load, so Leios gives three to five years of headroom even before partner chains and Hydra.
It is the biggest single upgrade, touching the ledger, network, incentive design, and how stake pool operators run.
IO aims to finish the testnet by November, but it cannot pull the hard fork lever, since the community and SPOs decide when to upgrade.
The Leios family reconciles the blockchain trilemma, scaling at 50 percent Byzantine resistance with fast finality from Paris and high decentralization.
The one downside of decentralization is losing tail predictability, so it is hard to know exactly when a completed upgrade will actually hard fork.
Leios is the last major update under the old IO engineering, a capstone of ten years building a research lab and world class team.
Leios establishes a tick tock cadence like Intel, a major throughput upgrade researched one year and implemented the next, every 24 months.
Ouroboros is back with self healing, telescoping, liquid non custodial staking, high decentralization, and multi chain consensus.
The extended UTXO model is about 75 percent complete, missing long running agents, which Star Stream and persistent event listeners would add.
David Schwartz of XRP rightly noted the inconvenient truth that smart contracts rely on off chain oracles and servers, not full decentralization.
Extended UTXO is the only way to resolve that, since agents can wake on a UTXO signal rather than a nightmarish persistent mutable account state.
A Cardano DeFi kernel concept from Fallen Acris would route complex DeFi fees into buying ADA for the treasury, creating upward demand.
Bitcoin DeFi is done through Pogen, Omar's team, not Bitcoin OS, delivering mirrored Bitcoin, lending, and yield.
The mirroring model expands to Litecoin and Dogecoin, and to XRP via Flare as a DVN on LayerZero, lending it to USDR for yield.
Sentiment is a trailing indicator, staying bad until about six months after success, so right now it is the worst it will ever be.
IO has three commercial vehicles launching on Cardano: RealFi, Pogen, and the already launched Midnight.
The governance plan includes a political party, delegated authorities, and executive function to reduce redundant funding.
Midnight went from a whitepaper a year ago to a launched mainnet with half its distribution done and Asian listings imminent.
Midnight differentiates holding ADA: 50 percent airdropped to ADA holders, block rewards to SPOs and holders, and new users via the glacier drop.
Midnight is the first Cardano native asset listed on Binance, opening listings for all CNAs and bringing privacy to apps paid in ADA.
Midnight's success invites more partner chains, a top growth vehicle, since the first mover solved the rough edges for the next.
The Ethereum Foundation cannot fund development long term, while Cardano's on chain treasury, built in 2015, would give it 390 million a year at 5 percent of Cardano's scale.
UTXO is more amenable to rollups and ZK than accounts, so as Ethereum pivots to ZK over three to five years, Cardano can leapfrog it.