Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson Reaffirms Leios as the Network's Answer to the Blockchain Trilemma

Leios – a significant protocol upgrade developed over six years specifically for Cardano – represents the network's current answer to the blockchain trilemma

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has confirmed that the network’s recent upgrade to Ouroboros Peras is now complete and has been deployed to the mainnet.

This upgrade, known as Leios, introduces several new features, including a voting layer for faster transaction finality and a new synchronization protocol for lighter nodes.

In response to a question on X (formerly Twitter), Hoskinson clarified that despite being open-source, Leios is currently implemented only on Cardano.

“[It’s] open-source in the sense that other chains can take the code and build it themselves, but they’re not, and they’re not welcome to use the Cardano brand if they do,” he explained.

This statement follows an earlier announcement from October 2024, where Hoskinson revealed that Cardano had been shifting resources specifically towards Ouroboros Leios. At that time, the project had nearly seven full-time employees working on it.

The shift to Leios came after substantial progress on Ouroboros Peras, an enhancement to Cardano’s consensus protocol. Peras introduced a voting layer that enables faster transaction finality, reducing the risk of block rollbacks. This feature is particularly beneficial for use cases requiring quick confirmation, such as partner chains and centralized exchanges.

Peras also addressed inefficiencies found in the earlier Ouroboros Praos protocol related to how long transactions took to be considered final, thereby boosting security and efficiency within Cardano’s decentralized framework.

However, while building on Peras, Leios pivots its focus heavily toward improving scalability and computational efficiency. Earlier Cardano protocols, including Praos, encountered throughput limitations due to specific data and communication dependencies between blocks. Leios is architected to eliminate these bottlenecks, which enables faster transaction processing and greater overall network capacity.

Key advancements introduced by Leios include tiered transaction fees, allowing users choice regarding priority, and enhanced chain synchronization methods that reduce the need to execute every smart contract during the node syncing process.

While the Leios protocol code is open-source, Hoskinson’s recent statements highlight that no other blockchain is currently utilizing this specific implementation. For the time being, Cardano remains the sole host of this significant protocol advancement as the network continues to evolve its core technology.