Shocking Moves in Cardano Treasury as IO Bets Big on Leios: You Won’t Believe This!

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In a rather audacious move, Input Output has filed nine requests for Cardano treasury withdrawals, including a staggering ₳27.7 million earmarked for the Leios project, all while the pressures of dwindling reserves and ambitious scaling targets loom ominously over our heads.

Yes, the Cardano treasury is feeling the heat as Input Output-affectionately known as IO-has submitted nine withdrawal actions, with the aforementioned ₳27.7 million request for Leios being the pièce de résistance. One can hardly contain the excitement.

These filings emerge at a time when Cardano, in its infinite wisdom, aims to boost transaction capacity from a measly 800,000 per month to a jaw-dropping 27 million by the year 2030. Quite the leap, wouldn’t you say? And all this while desperately seeking long-term fee support, as those reserve funds seem to be slipping through our fingers like sand.

Leios is touted as the crown jewel of consensus upgrades, promising to elevate throughput without sacrificing the security model we’ve come to know and love-or at least tolerate.

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Nine treasury actions add to funding pressure

IO has certainly been busy, submitting nine new proposals for Cardano treasury withdrawals. One might wonder if they’ve taken a page from the book of “How to Spend Money Wisely.”

The ensemble of requests spans developer tools, upgrades, maintenance, scalability, and every conceivable aspect of consensus work. The combined total? A trivial sum well over ₳160 million, but who’s counting?

The largest of these technical requests is none other than the Consensus Initiative, aiming for ₳27,714,342 for Leios development in the 2026 to 2027 cycle. Other notable mentions include ₳13,103,039 for Cardano Upgrades and ₳62,134,630 for the Cardano Maintenance Initiative, because why not?

And let’s not overlook a neat ₳10,425,871 request tied to Midgard Labs for layer-2 scalability. It seems everyone wants a piece of the pie, doesn’t it?

Separately, VacuumLabs has thrown their hat into the ring with a request for ₳11,877,575 aimed at enhancing Plutus performance, correctness, and usability. Blockfrost, ever the industrious entity, has also requested about ₳7.92 million for maintenance and some futuristic indexing solutions.

All of these grand designs come as Cardano governance grapples with the unpleasant task of balancing expenditure against a steadily shrinking treasury. After all, the ambitious 2030 target isn’t going to reach itself.

Input Output Group just submitted 9 Cardano Treasury Withdrawal proposals.

You can see all the details below.

– Cardanians (CRDN) (@Cardanians_io)

Leios is central to Cardano’s scaling plan

IO is presenting Leios as the magic bullet designed to deliver the much-needed increase in throughput. They assure us that Leios will extend Ouroboros Praos rather than cast it aside, a testament to their commitment to preserving the current security model while ambitiously expanding transaction capacity.

The proposal introduces Endorser Blocks and a committee-based validation system, presumably to make the whole process feel more democratic and less like a game of Monopoly.

According to the proposal, this design could potentially achieve a throughput increase of 10 to 65 times. That’s right, folks-without compromising decentralization or turning stake pool operations into a complete circus.

The Leios request is nestled within the broader Consensus Initiative portfolio, which IO claims is the largest technical undertaking among the submitted actions. They link this endeavor to Cardano’s aspirations for DeFi, real-world assets, and enterprise applications, which sounds all very grand indeed.

The proposal clarifies that the goal is not merely to chase theoretical limits but rather to construct sufficient network capacity to accommodate future demand. Naturally, this capacity enhancement is tied to the prospect of generating additional fee revenue over time-because what’s a little revenue generation among friends?

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Proposal sets path from testnet work to release candidate

IO informs us that the current budget cycle concludes in June 2026, with an Early Public Testnet milestone on the horizon. During this exciting period, they report that CIP-164 was merged, along with initial throughput showcased on an alpha feature-complete implementation. How thrilling!

Moreover, the proposal notes that Leios has already been deployed on a dedicated public testnet. The next cycle promises to transition the project from its prototype infancy toward the maturity of mainnet readiness. IO suggests that this stage will advance the work through Software Readiness Levels 5 to 8-whatever that means.

The first objective is to produce a release candidate, involving a rewrite of consensus components, conformance testing, and integration into the main node. It also entails crafting the Leios block structure for the Dijkstra ledger era-a name that rolls off the tongue quite nicely, wouldn’t you agree?

The second objective revolves around high-confidence validation through load testing and adversarial tests, because nothing says success like throwing a spanner in the works. The third objective involves hard-fork enabling work under IO’s watchful eye, encompassing documentation, workshops, client interfaces, and support for projects such as DB-Sync, Mithril, and Blockfrost.

Lastly, IO asserts that success will be gauged by the completion of these endeavors, not by the mainnet hard fork itself. A refreshingly pragmatic approach, wouldn’t you say?

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2026-04-23 09:05