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Following
ADA Pragmatic compromise in ambitious design
Cardano's current consensus mechanism, Ouroboros Praos, deliberately leaves silent gaps between blocks. Leios is designed as an optimistic consensus protocol based on Praos, where block producers can simultaneously create standard Praos blocks and secondary blocks that reference additional transactions. These secondary structures fill Praos's unused idle bandwidth.
The original Leios research described a more ambitious fully concurrent design that included independent block streams. However, Input Output's own design documentation states that this version cannot be directly applicable to Cardano's actual ledger. The currently proposed scheme is called linear Leios, which binds each new endorsement block to a common ranked block. Secondary blocks need to be verified by the committee before being included in the ledger, thereby significantly improving throughput. If no endorsement block is authenticated within a certain time slot, the chain will continue to run in accordance with standard Praos rules without interruption.
Throughput Goals and Dijkstra Roadmap
The streamlined design sacrificed some of its original ambitions in exchange for a practical solution. The architecture introduces additional block structures, including endorsement blocks, to process and authenticate more transactions through equity-based committees. The goal of Input Output is to initially increase Cardano's base layer throughput by 5 to 20 times. The plan overall aims to achieve a 10 to 65-fold increase in transaction capacity, and the official roadmap describes a move from the current approximately 4.5 KB/s to 200 KB/s. However, Carlos Lopez de Lara, product manager for Input Output, said that the main online line will conservatively start from 2 to 5 times the current capacity, unlocking higher caps as demand grows.
Linear Leios is part of Cardano's broader Dijkstra era. Cardano developers have determined the scope of the Dijkstra era and planned a two-phase upgrade: first deploying Ouroboros linear Leios and nested transactions, followed by introducing Peras consensus enhancements through a separate hard fork in 2027. The code completion target is set for the fourth quarter of 2026, but this date does not represent the final mainnetwork activation time.
As a result, Cardano does not have to rely on larger blocks or faster exit times to increase transaction capacity. The design retains Praos's existing security model and maintains the protocol's existing ability to counter malicious rights.
