Cardano Sets Stage for Major Speed Upgrade as Testnet Approaches

In a recent tweet, Cardano builder Input Output Group shared that the Leios testnet is landing in June. The development work builds on years of research and hundreds of simulations and marks the shift from theory to delivery.

The Leios upgrade targets a 10 to 65x increase in throughput and moves Cardano toward 1,000 plus TPS, with the mainnet planned by the end of 2026.

Leios boosts Ouroboros Praos rather than replacing it. It introduces Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation to deliver a 10 to 65x throughput increase, directly aligned with Cardano’s 2030 adoption targets, without compromising decentralization or making stake pool operations economically unviable.

In June 2026, Leios is expected to reach an early public testnet milestone. During the current cycle, CIP-164 was merged, and initial throughput was demonstrated on an alpha feature-complete implementation.

The 2026/27 cycle focuses on maturing Leios from prototype to mainnet-ready, progressing through software readiness levels 5 to 8.

Cardano launches treasury proposals

This week, Input Output Group highlighted that the IO 2026 treasury proposals have gone live. These are nine initiatives that will allow Cardano to hit its 2030 targets and help move delivery toward a more decentralized ecosystem.

These include Developer Experience, which is a six-month program to streamline Cardano’s developer tooling, documentation, and onboarding, targeting a 30% improvement in developer growth rate. The Consensus initiative delivers sustainable throughput capacity at the Consensus layer, including Leios.

Cardano Upgrades includes three platform-level enhancements that expand Cardano’s economic models and remove onboarding friction: account address upgrades, multi-asset treasury, and Babel Fees.

The L2 Scalability initiative delivers production-ready L2 infrastructure through Hydra production hardening, Midgard mainnet launch, and shared L2-agnostic primitives.

Cardano High Assurance delivers automated formal verification and a unified developer toolkit for smart contract development on Cardano.

Cardano Maintenance will see to core platform maintenance, support, and operational infrastructure for the Cardano network. The Plutus initiative makes Cardano’s smart-contract platform easier to build on, cheaper to run, and more rigorously verified.

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