Input Output has outlined a staged rollout for Cardano’s Leios upgrade, with an initial goal of three to five times today’s transaction capacity and later governance votes potentially raising it to 10–15 times. The Oct. 20 update says Leios will arrive with the Dijkstra hard fork, followed by stake pool registration, live network load exercises and at least two protocol parameter updates. No fixed Dijkstra activation date has been set.
Activation requires stake pool operators to generate BLS voting keys after the hard fork and register them through updated pool certificates. Each registration becomes active at the next epoch boundary. Leios needs votes representing at least 75% of all active stake to certify an endorser block, and Input Output estimates participation from roughly the top 500–900 pools. Registration must sit comfortably above that threshold, with the current estimate requiring roughly 90–95% of delegated stake before Leios can operate. Pools without a registered BLS key can continue producing Praos blocks but cannot vote on Leios endorser blocks. Key registration requires no separate vote from delegated representatives or the Constitutional Committee.
The rollout follows Cardano’s July 18 van Rossem hard fork, which moved mainnet to Protocol Version 11. Before Dijkstra, Input Output plans a constitutional update covering new protocol parameters and the limits within which governance can change them. The constitutional amendment needs support from delegated representatives representing 75% of stake and two-thirds of the Constitutional Committee. The hard fork itself requires 60% of DRep stake, 51% of stake pool operator stake and two-thirds of the committee. Later throughput changes would require 67% of DRep stake, 51% of SPO stake and two-thirds of committee members.
Input Output’s initial capacity target uses today’s Praos ceiling of roughly 4.5 kilobytes of transactions per second as its baseline. The announced ranges imply approximately 13.5–22.5 TxkB/s initially and 45–67.5 TxkB/s at the later target, though these figures measure transaction data capacity rather than a fixed number of transactions per second. Governance can change Leios limits without another hard fork if proposals remain within approved constitutional guardrails.
Earlier testing on MusashiNet reached a peak of 26.8 TxkB/s against a Praos mainnet ceiling of 4.51 TxkB/s, or roughly 5.94 times the baseline. The 41-day Earth phase involved more than 127,000 blocks and 63 registered pools. The team documented and corrected implementation problems including memory leaks, chain forks, stalled synchronization and a network halt caused by handling an invalid certificate as a fatal error. For mainnet, Input Output plans conservative settings because the live network includes approximately 2,700 registered pools with different machines, connections and configurations. Leios retains Praos ranking blocks and adds endorser blocks when pending traffic exceeds what a ranking block can carry; transactions processed through endorser blocks are expected to reach the ledger in roughly 45–60 seconds.
On network economics, Input Output said more than 85% of epoch rewards currently come from Cardano’s Reserve. It cited a CIP-164 estimate that fee income would require sustained traffic of roughly 50–70 TxkB/s to reach break-even. The developer wrote that Leios creates a route to that level of activity, but does not create demand by itself. Other Dijkstra features include nested transactions, account enhancements, guard scripts, Plutus V4, freely withdrawable staking rewards and a pledge-leverage parameter. Separately, Cardano said only 21 of 103 listed apps had enabled transaction tracking for its leaderboard as of Oct. 20.
In a related regulatory development, the Cardano Foundation urged EU policymakers to avoid introducing new regulations for decentralized finance, staking and other blockchain activities and instead focus on improving the existing Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. In its Sept. 30 response to a European Commission consultation, the Foundation argued that simply providing blockchain infrastructure or software should not automatically qualify as offering a regulated financial service. Regulators should consider whether an identifiable person or entity actually controls the relevant assets or transactions before applying financial services requirements.
The Foundation said ADA holders can delegate stake without transferring custody or locking tokens, and direct participation supports network security and decentralization. Commercial staking services operated by intermediaries may involve custody or discretionary management and should be treated differently. It also called for clearer rules covering hybrid tokens, stablecoins and NFTs, while addressing overlaps with existing EU financial legislation such as MiFID II. The Foundation supported retaining the NFT exemption for genuinely unique and non-fungible assets and opposed a separate regulatory regime for NFT-related services. It warned that inconsistent regulatory interpretations across member states and complex compliance requirements could disadvantage smaller crypto businesses.
