Cardano Solved the Blockchain Trilemma – Leios Testnet in 2 Weeks

Leios is Cardano’s scaling solution for the future. It’s basically an upgrade of the layer one to make it faster. And what it will do, will propel Cardano to be on par with our competitors in terms of throughput and capacity to support more and more applications and users. I’m pleased to tell you, actually, we’re in active development now of Leios.

We’re working on the original node, the Haskell node. I’m happy to tell you that it’s coming this year in 2026. When it comes to blockchain design, there is something called the blockchain trilemma and it’s the three pillars that everyone is trying to strive for and that is speed, decentralization and security. Normally you can have two of the three, but you can’t really have all three at the same time.

When you have a really fast blockchain, you kind of have less decentralization because you need to centralize those servers to make things a lot faster. Or you may give up security to get more decentralization and speed out of your blockchain. And the Cardano side of things, we’ve gone for full decentralization and full security. Maximum on those aspects.

But it looks like we’re just on the cusp of also solving our scalability and speed issues here. And this is something that Leios is going to bring to the Cardano ecosystem. So let’s have a look at what we’re dealing with here. So Leios is just about to launch on public testnet and I’ve just heard the date of when this is going to be launched on the 23rd of June.

So not in six months or a year’s time. It’s literally, from the time recording this, about two and a half weeks. We’ll be able to see this on public testnet and stake pool operators in the Cardano ecosystem will be able to start firing up their own testnet nodes to try it out, see how it works, see how it operates, what type of resources we need to actually run this Leios node and see how it all works. Well, currently the throughput of the network is between 10 to 15 transactions per second.

With Leios, in our first release, we’re aiming to achieve a 50x improvement in network capacity. So that means 50 times faster. So we’ll be moving from that 10 transactions per second to 500 transactions per second. But that’s just the first release.

We’re not stopping there. We are actually in the next coming months going to prove and showcase that Leios can do a thousand transactions per second. So this will give us the confidence that we’re on the right path, where we can safely step up to a hundred times improvement and beyond in subsequent releases to mainnet. The idea and concept around Leios is that we’re going to be running parallel transactions at the same time.

So normally when you look at a blockchain such as Cardano, we have a sequential line of blocks. So we have one block followed by another and followed by another. And that’s usually how most blockchains work. But with Leios, it introduces input endorsers and multi-lane or parallel transactions.

So we’ll have multiple transactions all being confirmed at the same time and then being merged into one big main chain. So this is how Cardano is going to scale up. And we’re seriously at the cusp of actually having this done. So this could very well solve the blockchain trilemma.

And we know with Cardano, we have a lot of security behind there. We have formal verification. We have Haskell all built into the chain and smart contracts there. So we have a very rigorous approach when it comes to security.

We have a high level decentralization. There’s over 3,000 stake pool operators in the Cardano ecosystem, ranging from various different sizes, different entities. And each one of them runs multiple nodes as well. So we have a block producer and then relay nodes on top of that, which act as the bridges to the Cardano ecosystem.

So we have a high level decentralization in terms of its network. And we’ve seen recently from videos from Charles that there’s no real person in charge of the network anymore either, for good or worse. But we know that the actual environment, the ecosystem is also very decentralized in those aspects too. But now we’re going to have the speed side of things, the scalability, the ability to have parallel transactions and scale up that way.

So this is really exciting stuff. Cardano’s on the cutting edge of this kind of technology. I’m really excited about it. And to top it all off, we also have Midnight as well, which adds in that privacy layer for the Cardano ecosystem.

Really exciting stuff. So if you want to find out more about Leios, this is the development tracker here. You can find out a little bit more about the project, who’s working on it, the code, everything that is being built and the timeline and everything of when this is all going to be launched. So what do you think, guys?

Are we on the cusp of solving the blockchain trilemma? Will Cardano be the first blockchain that solves speed, scalability, decentralization and also security? All three of those pillars of blockchain design. Like to hear your comments down below.

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Like always, stay positive and I’ll see you in the next video. So how does Leios work? Well, it’s quite a complex design. I won’t go into everything today.

But the key to the design is we’re introducing a new block called an endorser block. The existing block that gets produced at the moment will now be called a ranking block. So we’ll have ranking blocks and endorser blocks. So the endorser block is where we really scale the network.

This is where we pack in a lot more transactions, like a lot. And ranking blocks basically stay the same and they’ll link to the endorser blocks. And the ranking blocks are basically a way of maintaining the security of the network. In case, you know, the SPOs are not able to produce an endorser block, the SPOs will still continue to build ranking blocks as per normal.

OK, so to confirm the performance metrics that we’re aiming for in this first release in 2026, is a 50x improvement in throughput, as I mentioned, which translates into 300 transaction kilobytes per second, which is the 500 transactions per second in the normal notation. And this will be at a confirmation time of between 20 to 80 seconds. So just to clarify, why am I talking about transaction kilobytes per second instead of transactions per second that we normally always talk about? Well, it’s a more accurate way of measuring throughput.

As you can see in this depiction of a block, it shows different size transactions, they’re like the grey squares, and you can see the different sizes. So in terms of measuring throughput capacity accurately, we must consider the size as well as the number of transactions added to the blockchain per second. And so that leads me to this diagram. So talking about the confirmation times…