Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently addressed whether the Cardano blockchain network is complete. In an X conversation, a user asked if Cardano was finished, to which Hoskinson replied that only one major milestone remains: the Leios upgrade. He described Leios as the final piece needed to consider Cardano complete, stating, "After Leios, yes. It has everything I wanted to do."
Hoskinson highlighted Cardano's existing features, including decentralized consensus, governance, development, EUTXO, Plutus, infinite scalability, security, formal methods, multiple independent nodes, and recursive self-improvement. He also noted that millions of people hold Ada, Cardano's native cryptocurrency.
The Leios upgrade is designed to significantly increase Cardano's transaction throughput and speed without compromising decentralization or security. It introduces endorser blocks and committee-based validation to enhance the current Ouroboros Praos protocol. The upgrade aims to boost throughput from 5-10 transactions per second (TPS) to around 100 TPS, with a long-term target of 1,000 TPS or more.
Hoskinson also mentioned working on a concept for Midnight, a Cardano-related privacy sidechain, which he described as the magnum opus of his career. He hinted that this concept could solve many problems in the cryptocurrency space. The Leios upgrade's public testnet, known as MusashiNet, launched on June 23, 2026, and has entered its Fire phase as of the latest update.