In an interview on The Wolf of All Streets podcast, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed new details about Cardano’s next major scalability upgrade, Leios, positioning it as a game-changing protocol enhancement designed to deliver “Solana-style speed” without sacrificing the project’s core commitments to decentralization and resilience.
“Leios is going to give us Solana-style speed but with full decentralization and no stalls,” said Hoskinson, drawing a deliberate contrast to Solana’s performance profile, which has delivered industry-leading throughput at the cost of periodic network failures and validator centralization concerns.
With Leios, Cardano is attempting to do what no other Layer 1 has achieved to date: combine throughput that can rival Solana’s with operational uptime and decentralization that match—or exceed—Bitcoin’s.
What Is Cardano’s Leios?
Leios is part of Cardano’s multi-pronged scaling strategy designed to increase the base layer’s throughput through parallelization of validation and execution processes, efficient handling of transaction inputs, and a more flexible mempool design. It builds upon the foundational principles of Extended UTXO (EUTXO), Cardano’s data model, which enhances Bitcoin’s original UTXO model with smart contract capabilities.
Leios is tightly integrated with input endorsers, a parallel pipeline that separates transaction propagation from block validation, allowing the network to process multiple transactions in parallel while maintaining deterministic ordering and consensus security. In essence, Leios is the execution layer upgrade that enables fast transaction processing without compromising on finality or decentralization.
“It’s not just about throughput—it’s about throughput under constraint,” Hoskinson emphasized. “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 speed and ultra-low transaction costs. However, it has also experienced 13 major outages since its mainnet beta launched in 2020. Critics argue that Solana’s validator requirements—high hardware specifications and reliance on a small number of operators—compromise decentralization and resilience.
Hoskinson used this contrast to position Cardano as a more resilient, decentralized alternative: “No stalls,” he said 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 aims to match Solana’s speed, but without introducing centralization vectors or risking downtime. Combined with upcoming technologies like Hydra (Cardano’s Layer 2 state-channel system) and Midgard (an optimistic rollup platform), Leios forms a key pillar in a modular scaling stack that is designed to meet future user and institutional demand.
According to Hoskinson, Cardano is not just aiming for performance parity with faster chains—it is building with resilience, governance, and self-sovereignty in mind.
Citing the Edward Decentralization Index, Hoskinson stated that Cardano ranks as the most decentralized Layer 1 in the industry today. The platform boasts over 1,000 DReps (delegated representatives) under its on-chain governance framework—“twice as many as the U.S. Congress,” he quipped—and a community-ratified on-chain constitution, passed with an 85% approval rating.
The network also maintains a massive $1.5 billion treasury, controlled by the community and earmarked for ecosystem development, protocol upgrades, and strategic investment. “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 same interview, Hoskinson detailed Cardano’s growing role in the emerging Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem, positioning it as a computational layer that can operate under Bitcoin’s security guarantees. Thanks to Babel fees, users can pay transaction costs in BTC while running smart 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 said.
Cardano’s architecture opens the door for the blockchain to become a central liquidity and execution hub for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and other UTXO-based assets—an ecosystem that collectively has more market cap and liquidity than Ethereum and Solana combined. “Cardano has a great chance to be the nexus of the entire UTXO DeFi ecosystem,” Hoskinson said. “And once Bitcoin DeFi turns on—and it will—ETFs, institutions, and hundreds of millions of users will follow.”
Hoskinson’s remarks also addressed ongoing criticisms that Cardano lacks the “hype cycles” of other 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 noted. “But because we’re not chasing memes or pumping VC tokens, people say we’re irrelevant. That’s frustrating.”
He argued that speculative trends—like meme coins or yield farming manias—may bring temporary attention, but rarely deliver lasting value. Cardano, by contrast, is building systems to support real-world assets, regulated finance, and public infrastructure use cases.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.6595.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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