In an interview on The Wolf of All Streets podcast, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed new particulars about Cardano’s subsequent main scalability improve, Leios, positioning it as a game-changing protocol enhancement designed to ship “Solana-style speed” with out sacrificing the undertaking’s core commitments to decentralization and resilience.
“Leios is going to give us Solana-style speed but with full decentralization and no stalls,” mentioned Hoskinson, drawing a deliberate distinction to Solana’s efficiency profile, which has delivered industry-leading throughput at the price of periodic community failures and validator centralization issues.
With Leios, Cardano is trying to do what no different Layer 1 has achieved thus far: mix throughput that may rival Solana’s with operational uptime and decentralization that match—or exceed—Bitcoin’s.
What Is Cardano’s Leios?
Leios is a part of Cardano’s multi-pronged scaling technique designed to extend the bottom layer’s throughput by means of parallelization of validation and execution processes, environment friendly dealing with of transaction inputs, and a extra versatile mempool design. It builds upon the foundational rules of Prolonged UTXO (EUTXO), Cardano’s information mannequin, which boosts Bitcoin’s unique UTXO mannequin with good contract capabilities.
Leios is tightly built-in with enter endorsers, a parallel pipeline that separates transaction propagation from block validation, permitting the community to course of a number of transactions in parallel whereas sustaining deterministic ordering and consensus safety. In essence, Leios is the execution layer improve that allows quick transaction processing with out compromising on finality or decentralization.
“It’s not just about throughput—it’s about throughput under constraint,” Hoskinson emphasised. “You can have all the TPS in the world, but if it only works when a few people are running everything on Amazon Web Services, that’s not decentralization. We wanted to do it right.”
Solana has made headlines for its blistering velocity and ultra-low transaction prices. Nonetheless, it has additionally skilled 13 main outages since its mainnet beta launched in 2020. Critics argue that Solana’s validator necessities—excessive {hardware} specs and reliance on a small variety of operators—compromise decentralization and resilience.
Hoskinson used this distinction to place Cardano as a extra resilient, decentralized various: “No stalls,” he mentioned pointedly. “Cardano has been running for nearly seven years, 24/7, without a single minute of downtime. That’s not an accident—that’s because we took the time to build it properly from the ground up.”
Not Like Solana
Leios goals to match Solana’s velocity, however with out introducing centralization vectors or risking downtime. Mixed with upcoming applied sciences like Hydra (Cardano’s Layer 2 state-channel system) and Midgard (an optimistic rollup platform), Leios varieties a key pillar in a modular scaling stack that’s designed to fulfill future consumer and institutional demand.
In keeping with Hoskinson, Cardano is not only aiming for efficiency parity with sooner chains—it’s constructing with resilience, governance, and self-sovereignty in thoughts.
Citing the Edward Decentralization Index, Hoskinson said that Cardano ranks as probably the most decentralized Layer 1 within the {industry} at the moment. The platform boasts over 1,000 DReps (delegated representatives) below its on-chain governance framework—“twice as many as the U.S. Congress,” he quipped—and a community-ratified on-chain structure, handed with an 85% approval score.
The community additionally maintains an enormous $1.5 billion treasury, managed by the neighborhood and earmarked for ecosystem growth, protocol upgrades, and strategic funding. “We’re close to finishing the roadmap we set out 10 years ago. The tools are coming online, and the Treasury ensures we can keep moving strategically—without having to bend to VC pressures or corporate shareholders.”
Bitcoin DeFi
In the identical interview, Hoskinson detailed Cardano’s rising position within the rising Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem, positioning it as a computational layer that may function below Bitcoin’s safety ensures. Due to Babel charges, customers pays transaction prices in BTC whereas operating good contracts on Cardano.
“We’re best-in-class for many different approaches. We predicted UTXO DeFi and suddenly Bitcoin DeFi is becoming a thing. We’re the first system to build that infrastructure. We’re going to be a great layer for Bitcoin DeFi,” Hoskinson mentioned.
Cardano’s structure opens the door for the blockchain to grow to be a central liquidity and execution hub for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and different UTXO-based property—an ecosystem that collectively has extra market cap and liquidity than Ethereum and Solana mixed. “Cardano has a great chance to be the nexus of the entire UTXO DeFi ecosystem,” Hoskinson mentioned. “And once Bitcoin DeFi turns on—and it will—ETFs, institutions, and hundreds of millions of users will follow.”
Hoskinson’s remarks additionally addressed ongoing criticisms that Cardano lacks the “hype cycles” of different chains or hasn’t produced flashy DeFi TVL numbers. “Year by year, our DApp count is growing. TVL is doubling annually. Transaction volume is up. And we’ve had zero major security incidents,” he famous. “But because we’re not chasing memes or pumping VC tokens, people say we’re irrelevant. That’s frustrating.”
He argued that speculative developments—like meme cash or yield farming manias—might convey non permanent consideration, however hardly ever ship lasting worth. Cardano, in contrast, is constructing techniques to help real-world property, regulated finance, and public infrastructure use instances.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.6595.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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