Charles Hoskinson Says Cardano Is Complete Only After Leios, With Testnet at 26.8 TxkB/s

Hoskinson Sets the Completion Bar

Leios, the throughput upgrade at the center of the Cardano (ADA) roadmap, is still at the public testnet stage, and founder Charles Hoskinson has told the community the project counts as finished only once it reaches mainnet. Writing on X on October 17, Hoskinson was asked directly whether Cardano is complete. His answer: “after Leios, yes.” The exchange turned a routine community question into a definition of done, and Hoskinson spelled out what sits on that list. He named decentralized consensus and governance, continuous development, the EUTXO model and the Plutus smart contract language, scalability, security, formal verification, multiple independent node implementations, and a structure capable of improving itself. Those, he indicated, are the elements he wanted from the start, and the completion test is his own as founder rather than a formal project milestone. Asked plainly, he declined to call the chain finished in its present state, tying completion to an upgrade that has not yet shipped. Every other item on the list, by his account, is already in place. Leios closes it. The upgrade extends Ouroboros, the chain's proof of stake consensus protocol, with the aim of raising transaction throughput while the consensus machinery already securing the chain keeps running. Cardano's official glossary sets out the mechanism: Leios issues larger “endorser blocks” alongside the existing Praos blocks, and a committee weighted by staking share verifies them. The Praos blocks keep their role in the scheme, so block production does not restart from zero when Leios arrives. The point of the design is to process more transactions without replacing the consensus system now in place. What the reply does not carry is a delivery date of its own; the timing lives in the upgrade's pipeline, which currently sits at the testnet.

Musashi Dojo Logs 26.8 TxkB/s

The stage the upgrade occupies can be read from its own test infrastructure. The public testnet, named Musashi Dojo, went live on June 23, 2026, and the Leios development blog reports that its first test phase recorded 26.8 TxkB/s. The 26.8 TxkB/s figure belongs to the first test phase, the earliest rung of a trial series whose later stages have yet to report. The unit deserves care: TxkB/s measures transaction data processed per second, so it describes data throughput rather than a count of transactions, and it is not interchangeable with the TPS figure traders usually quote. The blog's number therefore cannot be converted into a mainnet transactions-per-second estimate, and the distinction matters for anyone reading the testnet result as a performance promise. The dev blog functions as the canonical record for these trials, with each phase's figures published as the work advances. Between the current stage and production stands a defined sequence. Cardano's official glossary presents Linear Leios, the variant earmarked for the mainnet, as the headline feature of stage one of the Dijkstra hard fork, with a deployment target at the end of 2026. The on-chain governance process holds that schedule in its hands, so the fork date is set through Cardano's own decision machinery rather than a release calendar. Even after the hard fork is deployed, work remains for stake pool operators, who must register the keys they will use for voting; delegates weighing their options ahead of that step can start with our guide to choosing a Cardano (ADA) staking pool. Parameters then adjust step by step as the upgrade ramps up, meaning throughput rises in measured increments rather than in one jump. Until those steps complete, the throughput gain exists in test form only.

Read as a scope claim rather than a date promise, the statement raises the stakes of every gate Leios still has to pass. Dijkstra stage one must clear on-chain governance, stake pools must register voting keys, and parameters ramp in steps before the end-2026 target can hold. The market is not waiting: live spot monitoring shows ADA down 4.3% over the past 24 hours, and our Cardano technical analysis page carries the current readings. Smart money wallets have held net short ADA positions for seven days, while one analyst maps a 105% recovery path from the $0.22–$0.24 zone. Because the completion test is Hoskinson's, his role stays central; a 90% drop warning tied to his potential exit underlines the founder's weight in the narrative. Until the governance vote clears, the completion benchmark he set stays unmet.