Cardano has moved into the spotlight on multiple fronts on September 15, 2026, with the Cardano Foundation joining Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program and the Ouroboros Leios development team reporting a significant throughput milestone. The developments arrive as founder Charles Hoskinson issues a public warning about community criticism potentially driving builders away.
Under the Blockchains track of Mastercard’s program, the Cardano Foundation will work with Mastercard and other participants on payments and stablecoins, including cross-border money movement, B2B transactions, and settlement. The Foundation described the move as another step toward connecting public blockchain infrastructure with global payments, reflecting a growing focus on real-world financial use cases beyond simple transfers between crypto users.
On the network performance side, Carlos Lopez de Lara showcased testing work with Leios architect Sebastian Nagel. In a local cluster test, the Leios node reached a peak of 250 TxkB/s, equivalent to roughly 1,000 simple 250-byte transactions per second, compared with the current mainnet top speed of about 4.5 TxkB/s. The test used emulated round-trip times to improve fidelity, but the team stressed that tuning and optimization are still required to replicate those results under real internet conditions.
Meanwhile, Hoskinson used a livestream titled “Devs versus Builders” to argue that Cardano’s long-term success depends on applications built on its infrastructure. He urged the community and the Cardano Foundation to embrace Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain, as a major ecosystem project rather than viewing it as a rival. Hoskinson warned that persistent criticism of successful projects could discourage other developers from choosing to build on Cardano. He also pointed to RealFi, which he said is launching next month, as a route to stablecoin-based lending and real-world finance, with a particular focus on banking the unbanked in Africa.
