In the latest Essential Cardano360 broadcast, Input Output Global (IOG) shared new details surrounding its novel consensus innovation, Ouroboros Leios, which could potentially position Cardano among the fastest blockchain platforms in the industry. The discussion featured Senior Prototyping Engineer at IOG, Brian Bush, offering insights into the technical mechanics behind this next stage of Cardano’s evolution.
Cardano’s Next Big Leap
Bush explained that Ouroboros Leios proposes two new categories of blocks, designed to function alongside the existing Ouroboros Praos blocks, in order to significantly enhance transaction throughput: “So what we do is we introduce two more types of blocks in addition to the traditional Praos blocks. One is the input blocks and these contain transactions and these might occur at quite a high rate. So every couple seconds or even faster, you’d have input blocks with lots of transactions.”
According to Bush, these high-frequency input blocks are then referenced by endorser blocks, which the network collectively verifies. He described it as a “hierarchy” that enables the aggregation of more transactions in a provably secure way: “Those are bundled together by reference to something called an endorser block.And then the nodes vote on those blocks to make sure everything’s secure and verified. And there’s a reference to put on the Praos block. So it’s kind of a hierarchy or a level of indirection of funneling in more transactions that are provably included on the blockchain.”
Bush also underscored the potential of Ouroboros Leios to position Cardano at the forefront of blockchain scalability. While results depend on ongoing assessments, he offered an optimistic outlook: “Well, it highly depends on the outcome of the assessment that we’re doing right now. But if everything goes well, we will have the fastest Nakamoto-style consensus in the blockchain industry and one of the fastest blockchain in the whole industry.
He further added that this advancement would help developers build on Cardano without feeling constrained by throughput limitations: “So it means that for people working, developing applications on Cardano, the transaction throughput won’t be an issue that they will have to consider.”
Charles Hoskinson On Ouroboros Leios
Earlier this month, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson delved into the topic during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, reiterating the roadmap for Cardano’s new protocol expansions: “When you look at the roadmap that we published, that roadmap, it includes pretty much everything you guys want. Midgard, Leios, making Leios a first-class citizen. In fact, I told the dev teams, let’s try to find a way with Laos to implement it after prototype, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Hoskinson emphasized a never-before-attempted round-the-clock development model, highlighting the urgency and importance placed on bringing Ouroboros Leios to fruition: “Meaning that we’ll have stacked dev teams, some working the day shift, some working the night shift, and some working weekends, night and day. This has never been done before in the history of a cryptocurrency project, but I think it conveys the seriousness upon which we need that protocol, because it’ll basically make us one of the fastest cryptocurrencies in the world.”
He also referenced Midgard and rollup solutions as part of a broader strategy to create a robust Layer 2 ecosystem: And with Midgard and Rollups, that will also give us the fastest layer two ecosystem, and a much superior layer two ecosystem to the one from Ethereum, because of extended UTXOs, unique security properties.”
At press time, ADA traded $0.7756.
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