Input Output Global (IOG), the engineering firm behind Cardano’s core development, released a detailed update Wednesday outlining how it plans to guide the network through the rest of the year and beyond — with an eye to 2030-scale growth.
At the center of the roadmap is Leios, a major upgrade IOG hopes to drive from early prototype into mainnet readiness during the 2026/27 cycle. The plan aims to dramatically increase Cardano’s transaction capacity—from roughly 800,000 transactions per month today to as many as 27 million per month—by reworking core protocol components and rolling the change out in tightly managed stages.
IOG is organizing the work around Software Readiness Levels 5–8, a stepwise framework intended to make sure Leios is not only built but rigorously tested and hardened before deployment. Rather than chasing a single milestone, the company breaks the engineering and validation effort into three primary objectives:
- Release Candidate (the critical path): This is the main development track for Leios. It includes a substantial under‑the‑hood rewrite of consensus components and the introduction of a new Leios block structure that IOG calls the “Dijkstra ledger era.” Verification work here involves completing a conformance test suite against an Agda formal specification and integrating the upgrade into the primary node implementation.
- High Confidence (validation and resilience): Focused on proving the upgrade’s behavior at scale, this stream pairs parameter exploration with continuous load testing and adversarial testing on the public testnet. Practically, that means studying timing parameters and size limits, then producing a parameter‑graduation plan as the system matures.
- Hard‑fork Enabling Leios (preparatory work under IOG’s control): Rather than tying success to an on‑chain activation date, IOG defines this objective as finishing the preparatory tasks that make a hard fork possible. That includes stabilizing client interfaces, producing implementation‑independent technical documentation, running developer workshops to ready the ecosystem, creating a mainnet parameter graduation plan, devising contingency procedures, and updating governance guardrails and rationale documents. Success, IOG says, will be measured by completing these enablement tasks — not by the exact timing of a mainnet activation.
IOG frames Leios as a lever for broader network growth: higher throughput could increase total value locked (TVL), bolster fee revenue as the Reserve declines, and support long‑term sustainability through greater adoption. Summing up the company’s view, IOG’s Carlos Lopez de Lara said: “We have been researching and prototyping Leios for years. The science is done. Now we deliver it. When this ships, Cardano’s throughput story changes permanently.”
Market snapshot: ADA was trading at $0.25 at the time of writing, up about 2% over 24 hours and roughly 4% over seven days.
Image: OpenArt; chart: TradingView.com
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