Input Output Global activated the Musashi Dojo public testnet for Ouroboros Leios on June 23, 2026, opening the first live trial of Cardano’s planned base-layer throughput upgrade.
Leios runs parallel endorser block pipelines alongside the existing Ouroboros Praos security model instead of replacing it. BeInCrypto reports that the protocol targets 30 to 65 times current Praos throughput. Edgen reports a separate target of more than 1,000 transactions per second, compared with roughly 10 today, and about 27 million transactions a month against the current roughly 800,000.
That capacity gap is the problem Leios is meant to test: whether Cardano can raise base-layer throughput without discarding Praos. Product manager Carlos Lopez De Lara framed the same issue in bandwidth terms at the Cardano Forum, saying: “Cardano can scale from its current throughput of 4.5 KB/s up to 200 KB/s.”
The testnet is divided into five phases named after chapters in Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void. The phases move from basic protocol validation through parameter tuning and real-world performance testing, then into adversarial stress scenarios, BeInCrypto reported. The Fire phase is marked as critical for stake pool operator participation. Lopez De Lara said a rapid capacity increase could impose unnecessary costs on SPOs and is not the current aim.
At launch, the Leios codebase had surpassed 705,000 lines of consensus code, per Edgen and Blockonomi.
Input Output is targeting a hard fork as early as November 2026, with mainnet deployment contingent on results across all five testnet phases, BeInCrypto reported. A June 24, 2026 Cardano Forum digest confirmed the testnet was live.
The Musashi Dojo name is a tribute to Cardano’s Japanese community and the philosophy of Miyamoto Musashi, according to the official Leios site.