governance
Cardano DReps pass Leios scaling proposal with 84%, releasing ₳27.7M
Cardano's delegated reps approved Input Output's Leios funding on May 24 with about 84% turnout, unlocking ₳27.7M from the treasury. Testnet targets June 23.
Cardano's on-chain governance cleared the Leios scaling proposal on Sunday, with about 84% of delegated representatives (DReps) voting yes. The vote releases ₳27.7M from the Cardano treasury to Input Output Global to fund the work, with a testnet launch scheduled for June 23, 2026.
What happened
Input Output Global (IOG), the original Cardano developer, submitted a treasury proposal asking for ₳27.7M to fund the Consensus Initiative — the work stream marketed as Leios. DReps approved it on May 24 with roughly 84% in favour.
IOG submitted Leios alongside a wider cluster of treasury asks this spring covering protocol maintenance, the Plutus toolchain, developer experience and higher-assurance engineering. Leios is the headline number, and the only line item with a publicly committed testnet date attached.
How Leios changes throughput
Leios is the engineering name for Ouroboros Leios, a redesign of how Cardano blocks propagate and reach consensus. The chain today serialises block production around one elected slot leader per slot. Leios splits work across input, endorser and ranking blocks, so multiple producers can build in parallel and consensus catches up after the fact.
The published target is to move Cardano from roughly 800,000 monthly transactions toward 27M monthly without changing the L1 ledger rules. The proposal pays for taking a feature-complete prototype, already running on a dedicated test environment, through Software Readiness Levels 5 to 8 — lab demo to production-grade. Mainnet activation is not committed in the proposal; only the June 23 testnet drop is.
Where the money goes
The ₳27.7M is roughly half of IOG's original 2026 ask. Earlier this spring IO trimmed its treasury request after DRep pushback over the size of its 2025 envelope; the cut shifted weight onto Leios and away from a parallel Bitcoin-DeFi research request that founder Charles Hoskinson has said IOG will not resubmit if it loses the ballot.
The disbursement is tied to milestone deliverables in the proposal text rather than paid upfront — a structure DReps have used since the first treasury votes opened to keep leverage over execution.
What to watch
- The June 23 testnet drop. Whether IOG ships Leios on its committed date is the first concrete read on whether the funded team can hit milestones rather than only write specs.
- A CIP for Leios consensus rules. Throughput claims stay paper until a Cardano Improvement Proposal describes the chain rules and the stake-pool software supports them.
- DRep behaviour on the remaining IOG asks. Roughly half of IO's 2026 envelope is still in front of DReps. Whether they approve the rest, and on what terms, says more about how much real leverage the treasury has over the original developer than the Leios vote alone.
Context
The Leios vote is the largest scaling-specific ADA disbursement Cardano's on-chain treasury has signed since the Chang hard fork moved fund control on-chain in 2024. It's also the first eight-figure ADA cheque DReps have written against a protocol-engineering deliverable rather than ecosystem operations or grant programmes — and that precedent will shape how IOG and competing teams structure their next requests.
Sources:
- Crypto Times — Cardano Pushes Ahead With Leios After Strong Governance Vote (May 25, 2026)
- CoinGape — Cardano News: Leios Proposal Passes Ahead of June Testnet Launch