- Cardano’s new Leios improve goals to match Solana’s pace with out sacrificing decentralization or uptime.
- Hoskinson says Cardano is able to lead Bitcoin DeFi by supporting UTXO-based belongings with good contracts.
- With over 1,000 DReps and a $1.5B treasury, Cardano is concentrated on resilience, governance, and long-term utility.
In a current interview on The Wolf of All Streets podcast, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson pulled the curtain again on what may be the mission’s most bold improve but: Leios.
The thought? Carry “Solana-style pace” to Cardano—however do it with out sacrificing what makes the community tick: decentralization, stability, and 0 downtime.
“Leios goes to offer us Solana-style pace however with full decentralization and no stalls,” Hoskinson stated, clearly throwing shade at Solana’s repeated outages and its reliance on a small set of validators with excessive {hardware} necessities.
Cardano’s aiming to do what—frankly—no different Layer 1 chain has fairly pulled off but: mix blazing throughput with the type of stability you’d anticipate from one thing like Bitcoin. Tall order.
So… What Is Leios, Precisely?
Leios is a core a part of Cardano’s broader scaling roadmap, designed to ramp up efficiency on the base layer. Assume parallel transaction processing, smarter dealing with of mempools, and separating execution from block validation—all whereas sticking to Cardano’s good contract-ready EUTXO mannequin.
It additionally hooks instantly into enter endorsers, a system that lets the community course of a number of transactions in parallel with out messing up consensus or safety.
“It’s not nearly TPS,” Hoskinson stated. “It’s about TPS below constraint. In case your blockchain solely works when it’s run on AWS by 5 individuals? That’s not decentralization.”
Solana, in fact, is known for its pace—and in addition for crashing. Since launching its mainnet beta in 2020, it’s had 13 main outages. For Hoskinson, that’s a nonstarter. He made it clear:
“Cardano’s been reside for almost seven years, 24/7, with out a single minute of downtime. That’s not luck—that’s structure.”
Extra Pace—However Not on the Price of Core Values
Whereas Leios is constructed to deal with throughput like Solana, it’s additionally meant to keep away from the identical trade-offs. Paired with Cardano’s Hydra (Layer 2 state channels) and Midgard (a rollup resolution), Leios varieties a chunk of a modular scaling stack meant to deal with each on a regular basis use and enterprise-grade calls for.
And based on Hoskinson, it’s not nearly efficiency—it’s about resilience, governance, and self-sovereignty too.
Cardano presently ranks as essentially the most decentralized Layer 1, primarily based on the Edward Decentralization Index, boasting over 1,000 DReps below its governance framework—greater than double the variety of U.S. Congress members, as Hoskinson jokingly identified.
There’s additionally a $1.5 billion community-controlled treasury, with funds put aside for protocol upgrades, ecosystem help, and long-term improvement—no VCs wanted.
Cardano’s Angle on Bitcoin DeFi
Hoskinson additionally dove into Cardano’s position within the rising world of Bitcoin DeFi. Due to its structure and options like Babel charges (which let customers pay gasoline in BTC), Cardano is positioning itself as a sensible contract layer that may run on high of Bitcoin’s safety mannequin.
“We predicted UTXO DeFi—and now it’s taking place,” Hoskinson stated. “We’re the primary system that truly constructed the instruments for it.”
The large imaginative and prescient? To show Cardano right into a hub for UTXO-based chains like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin—chains that collectively maintain extra liquidity than Ethereum and Solana mixed.
“Cardano could possibly be the nexus of the complete UTXO DeFi ecosystem,” Hoskinson added. “And as soon as Bitcoin DeFi takes off—and it’ll—ETFs, establishments, and tens of millions of customers are gonna observe.”
“No Hype, Simply Work”
Hoskinson didn’t shrink back from the criticism that Cardano hasn’t produced the flashy DeFi numbers that different chains boast—or chased meme coin insanity for consideration.
“12 months by 12 months, our DApp rely grows. Our TVL doubles. We’ve had zero main safety incidents,” he famous. “However we don’t chase tendencies. We construct methods that may run real-world belongings, regulated finance, and public infrastructure.”
On the time of writing, ADA is buying and selling at $0.6595. No moonshots, no meme hype—however Hoskinson appears superb with that.
“The hype cycles will come and go. What issues is what we’re constructing lasts.”