Governance Hour #5 - IO: Consensus Initiative Proposal

Governance Governance Events & Workshops
1

gov5
gov51920×1080 81.3 KB

Join us for a new Cardano Governance Hour!

This session takes a closer look at the Leios proposal, together with Carlos Lopez de Lara, Product Manager at Input Output Group.

The discussion will focus on how Leios aims to scale Cardano’s throughput by introducing Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation, targeting a 10–65x increase in transaction capacity while maintaining decentralization and stake pool viability. We will also take the opportunity to explore how (and if) Leios benefits Stake Pool Operators, in particular through the introduction of Endorser Blocks.

As outlined in IO’s proposal, Leios is designed to support Cardano’s 2030 growth ambitions, enabling higher transaction volumes across DeFi, real-world assets, and enterprise use cases. With a Treasury ask of more than ₳27 million, the session will also cover the engineering work, testing strategy, and ecosystem coordination required to progress from public testnet to hard-fork readiness.

:date: Tuesday, 19 May
:eight_o_clock: 16:00 – 17:00 UTC

Stay updated with our events!
You can subscribe directly to the calendar here: https://www.addevent.com/calendar/ktbtrxrv3355

Join the discussion below! We’ll update this thread with the recording link as soon as it’s live.

1 Like
2

Summary: Governance Hour #5 – IO’s Consensus Initiative (Leios)

In this episode of the Governance Hour, Nicolas Cerny (Governance Lead at the Cardano Foundation) speaks with Carlos Lopez de Lara, Product Manager for Leios at Input Output. They dive deep into the Treasury withdrawal governance action for the IO Consensus Initiative, which requests 27 million ada to mature Ouroboros Leios from a prototype to a mainnet-ready state.

The Why: Scaling for the 2030 Vision
Carlos explains that growing global regulatory clarity and institutional interest present a massive market opportunity for Cardano by 2027 and 2028. To capture this, the network must prepare for a massive scale-up, aiming for the 2030 vision of 27 million transactions per month. Furthermore, as the ada reserves used for staking rewards deplete over the coming years, the network must transition to being fully sustained by transaction fees. This makes higher throughput an absolute necessity to ensure stake pool operations remain profitable.

How Leios Works: Endorser Blocks
Ouroboros Leios is an overlay protocol that runs on top of the existing Praos consensus. Currently, nodes experience roughly 20 seconds of idle time between block productions. Leios utilizes this time to create “endorser blocks”, which can range from 500 kilobytes up to 12 megabytes in size. A committee of stake pool operators (representing 99 percent of the stake) validates and votes on these transactions. Once endorsed, a certificate is included in the next standard Praos block, allowing the network to process vastly more transactions in parallel.

The Roadmap and Hard Fork
The requested budget covers three main streams: a release candidate, systematic validation (high confidence track), and hard fork enabling. The team is aiming for a public testnet in June and targets being ready for a mainnet hard fork by the end of 2026. Because Leios introduces new protocol parameters, a prerequisite for this hard fork is that the community must first update the Cardano Constitution and the guardrail script.

Synergy with Developer Experience
Carlos highlighted that while Leios provides the network capacity (acting as a “wider road”), it must go hand-in-hand with better developer tooling. He urged the community to also support the separate Developer Experience proposal, as streamlined onboarding and ready-to-use smart contracts are what will ultimately attract builders to utilize this new capacity.

Top Five Q&A (FAQ) about the Leios Proposal

Question 1: What is Ouroboros Leios?
Answer: Leios is an overlay protocol designed to drastically increase Cardano’s throughput. It works on top of the current Praos consensus by utilizing the idle time between standard blocks to create and validate large “endorser blocks”, allowing for much higher transaction capacity.

Question 2: Why is this proposal requesting 27 million ada from the Treasury?
Answer: The funding is needed to take Leios from its current prototype phase all the way to a production-ready state for the mainnet by the end of 2026. This includes complex engineering, extensive adversarial testing, parameter exploration, and ecosystem coordination leading up to the hard fork.

Question 3: How does Leios ensure the long-term viability of stake pools?
Answer: As the treasury reserves used for delegator rewards deplete over time, stake pools will need to rely purely on transaction fees to survive. Leios provides the necessary throughput to process millions of transactions per month, making a fee-sustained ecosystem possible.

Question 4: What role do stake pool operators play in the new Leios design?
Answer: Under the Leios protocol, a committee representing 99 percent of the stake will vote on the new endorser blocks. Operators will validate the transactions within these massive blocks and issue votes, ensuring decentralized and secure verification before the data is included in the next regular block.

Question 5: What governance steps are required before Leios can launch on the mainnet?
Answer: Because Leios introduces new protocol parameters, the Cardano Constitution must be updated to include these parameters before the hard fork can occur. Additionally, the guardrail script must be updated with the appropriate limits established during the testnet phase.