Cardano spends 71 million USD on core upgrades: Ouroboros Leios paves the way for a new breakout

Cardano is getting closer to the long-planned upgrade aimed at increasing network throughput, while also calling on the community to contribute feedback. Specifically, the Cardano improvement proposal (CIP) titled "Ouroboros Leios" has now been made public in the Cardano Foundation repository.

On August 27, Nicolas "BeRewt" Biri – Software Architecture Director at the blockchain research company Input Output – announced the public release of CIP Leios. He emphasized that while it is still too early to celebrate, the submission of this proposal marks a truly important milestone, and the development team wants to ensure that the community is in agreement before proceeding to the next step.

Someone mentioned that the development team is reviewing the design options as well as the trade-offs that need to be considered. The items include: detailed variants of Leios, deployment documents ( official specifications and mini) protocols, technical trade-offs, potential positive impacts on resource budget and attack resistance capabilities.

He added that the team plans to submit the PR* by the end of August. The current draft has also incorporated feedback related to failed transactions, with the goal of minimizing impact on the dApp's operations.

Controversy over security, speed, and decentralization

Not all members of the community believe that Cardano can achieve higher throughput without sacrificing anything.

A user asked whether the network has to make trade-offs like Solana to achieve speed. Biri replied that Cardano has deliberately avoided that path, choosing a balance that does not compromise decentralization or security.

He explained that Cardano's security model restricts certain speed optimizations, meaning that if it wants to achieve speeds like Solana, the network would have to sacrifice decentralization, reliability, or cost-effectiveness – something that the Cardano community is not yet willing to compromise on.

The community raised 71 million USD to fund upgrades

At the beginning of this month, the Cardano community approved 96 million ADA (equivalent to about 71 million USD) to fund a series of core upgrades lasting one year.

The proposal was passed with 74% support, marking the first time that the treasury fund was allocated directly for core development.

With these steps, Cardano is taking an important step towards the goal of increasing throughput, scaling, and developing based on community consensus.

*PR (Pull request) is a request to send new code from a separate branch into the main branch of the project. When a developer finishes writing a feature, fixing a bug, or updating documentation, they will "create a PR" to suggest that the development team review it and, if it meets the requirements, merge it into the main project.

Itadori