Leios 24/7 development tracker launches

Summary:

• Leios is a significant step forward for Cardano’s scalability, throughput, and long-term sustainability
• Recent milestones – from foundational research to public presentations and the transition to engineering – demonstrate the protocol's progress toward implementation
• Leios introduces a new development tracker giving insight into the 24/7 global work, highlighting contributions, milestones, and ongoing progress
• The launch heralds a more transparent approach to building core infrastructure for the Cardano ecosystem.

Leios has become one of the hottest and most discussed technical developments, highlighting its significance for throughput, scalability, and long-term sustainability of the Cardano ecosystem. Earlier this year, Input | Output (IO) shared Ouroboros Leios’ design goals and research foundations, discussing how Leios enables higher throughput while preserving security and decentralization. The Crypto 2025 presentation expanded on that work, outlining Leios’s potential to reshape how blockchains process transactions at scale.

The development teams presented a prototype tracker at RareEvo and Token2049, giving the community an early glimpse of how Leios is being built. In September, the project formally transitioned from Input | Output Research (IOR) to Input | Output Engineering (IOE), marking the shift from foundational research to implementation.

Today, the Leios tracker is live. It provides a clear, consolidated, data-driven view of global development activity, demonstrating how Leios is progressing toward delivery.

Strengthening Cardano’s foundations with Leios

Leios is the next evolution of the Ouroboros consensus protocol. It is designed to make Cardano more efficient and ready for higher demand without compromising its security or decentralization. The protocol focuses on continuous transaction processing, addressing current throughput constraints and enabling far greater capacity for real-world applications.

Leios builds on years of peer-reviewed research and rigorous simulation work. By applying these findings directly in implementation, Leios reflects Cardano’s research-first but delivery-focused approach.

Introducing the Leios development tracker

Momentum and accountability 

Leios’s development adheres to a ‘follow-the-sun’ model. Globally distributed teams from IOE and contributors from the wider Cardano technical community work in parallel across multiple time zones for round-the-clock progress. This ensures progress while upholding Cardano’s core values of rigor, security, and openness.

The tracker captures this workflow and provides a consolidated space for monitoring project activity, enabling tighter resource coordination to drive improved development cadence.

Radical transparency in practice

The tracker gives the community visibility into Leios' development, showing:

• Overall product development progress
• Key milestones and their status
• Active workstreams
• Contributions across repositories
• Latest news.

Because the codebase is open source, anyone can review development activity, log and discuss any issues, and contribute. Development progress is tracked via the Leios roadmap and activity GitHub board, with all issues and sub-issues linked to their corresponding objectives and milestones, with relevant labelling. Milestone progress is also shared in monthly demo sessions, offering ongoing context beyond the tracker data. This format makes it easier to understand how research, prototyping, and engineering tasks connect, and how development is progressing. See the presentation at RareEvo for more details.

Community-powered innovation

Leios is not delivered by IO alone. Community contributors participate through development work, open dialogue, and the Cardano CIP process. The tracker supports this collaboration by giving all contributors a shared reference point. It reflects how Cardano’s technical community collaborates to shape direction, refine designs, and ensure that implementation aligns with the ecosystem's needs.

A new way of building together

The tracker provides maximum visibility into the development and testing process, demonstrating a more transparent and efficient approach. Making global activity visible and accessible, the tracker helps the community monitor Leios' progress, understand upcoming work, and follow the momentum as the protocol moves toward deployment.

For stake pool operators, delegated representatives, decentralized application developers, and ada holders, this clarity supports better planning and engagement. For the wider engineering community, it shows how an open, research-informed, and globally collaborative model can deliver high-stakes infrastructure efficiently.

The Leios tracker is ready for you to explore development progress, follow the roadmap, and learn more about the engineering behind the protocol. Check it out and get involved now:

• Leios development tracker
• Leios documentation site
• Leios repository
• Leios roadmap.