Cardano could secure XRP Ledger (XRPL)-level performance by increasing throughput by up to 60 times through the Ouroboros Leios upgrade it aims to apply this year, a report said.

The Crypto Basic, a blockchain outlet, reported on July 4 that Charles Hoskinson (찰스 호스킨슨) said in a podcast interview that Leios would sharply lower Cardano’s scalability limits.

In a conversation with David Gokhshtein, Hoskinson said Leios technology could significantly lift Cardano’s current processing performance. "Leios will be 60 times by internal system throughput standards," he said, adding that transactions per second could rise sharply. He forecast that once Cardano reaches that level it would have performance similar to the XRP Ledger.

The core of the remarks is that Cardano no longer sees transaction processing speed as a weakness. The XRP Ledger has shown strength in payments and cross-border remittances on the back of fast settlement and high throughput. The XRP Ledger typically finalises transactions within 3 to 5 seconds and supports up to 1,500 TPS. In March 2026, it topped 120 TPS while processing about 650 transactions at a time of concentrated network activity.

Cardano says it will maintain its network design principles alongside performance improvements through the upgrade. Hoskinson stressed that the throughput expansion was not achieved at the cost of decentralisation and security. He said Cardano improved throughput without abandoning its core principles, especially decentralisation and security.

That links to the balance among scalability, decentralisation and security, which is seen as a major challenge in the blockchain industry. Many networks have raised performance by conceding some other factors, but Cardano aims to show such trade-offs are not inevitable. Hoskinson set out a direction of providing the speed needed for mass adoption through Leios while preserving the principles the ecosystem has maintained since launch.

The development timeline is also being firmed up. The Ouroboros Leios upgrade officially began a public testnet on June 23. The testnet, called Musashi Dojo, marked the first time the protocol was run in a real network environment. Cardano plans to move to a mainnet deployment this year after verifying technical stability and performance.

If the mainnet rollout happens within the year, Leios could become one of the most important scalability upgrades in Cardano’s history. Key points to watch are whether the throughput gains shown on the testnet are maintained in the mainnet environment and whether Cardano can deliver performance that, as Hoskinson said, stands shoulder to shoulder with the XRP Ledger.

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