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Cardano Leios shows 6x throughput gains, but staking economics hinge on demand
During a 41-day Leios testnet, throughput peaked at 26.8 TxkB/s and the upgrade carried 54% of the traffic to the chain, while fee and staking-reward viability depends on paying usage as ADA reserve contributions decline.
Cardano’s Leios upgrade has demonstrated sixfold throughput gains in its public testnet phase, with developers citing a peak of 26.8 transaction kilobytes per second versus a 4.51 TxkB/s ceiling under Cardano’s existing Ouroboros Praos system, according to CryptoSlate. In the stable final days of the 41-day test, Leios carried 54% of the traffic reaching the chain and processed an 18-times higher transaction count than Cardano mainnet did over a comparable period.
CryptoSlate reports the test traffic was artificially generated to stress the system rather than driven by users paying to transact, a factor that matters because Cardano staking rewards rely on transaction fees plus releases from its remaining ADA reserve. That reserve contribution declines over time, meaning network activity needs to generate more fees to support rewards for stake pool operators and delegators.
Leios is designed to remove a throughput ceiling that could limit Cardano’s ability to generate sufficient transaction fees as reserve releases diminish, the story says. The upgrade adds parallel capacity by using larger Endorser Blocks that carry additional transactions, while committees validate those blocks before recording transactions, allowing the network to process more activity without replacing its existing security approach.
CryptoSlate adds that Input Output said the testnet produced more than 127,000 blocks and announced about 30,000 Endorser Blocks, with 63 stake pools registering during the phase. Developers also shipped fixes for issues found under load, and while none exposed flaws in the Leios protocol, the key open question remains whether real users will fill the additional block space to generate fee revenue.