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- IO Global says its new Cardano treasury request is just under 50% of last year’s total, with voting open until May 24.
- Leios remains the centerpiece of the roadmap, though IO’s public tracker suggests the scaling effort is still in mid-development ahead of a June testnet target.
IO Global is asking the Cardano community for less money this year, but with a much clearer emphasis on one thing: scaling.
In a post on X on Wednesday, the company said its total treasury funding request is just under half of last year’s, while governance voting will remain open until May 24. The proposals span core infrastructure, developer tooling and economic design, though the real center of gravity is obvious enough. Leios sits at the heart of the roadmap.
Leios is being framed as Cardano’s scaling answer
IO’s consensus proposal ties the effort to a long-range target that is hard to miss. Under what it calls the 2030 Vision, Cardano is meant to grow from roughly 800,000 transactions per month today to more than 27 million. In that framing, Leios is not just another optimization layer. It is being presented as the mechanism specifically built to carry the chain there.
That explains why the treasury discussion is landing so squarely around it. If Cardano is going to make a serious case for higher throughput without abandoning its design priorities, Leios has to move from roadmap language into working infrastructure.
The company says testnet is expected in June, with mainnet targeted by the end of 2026.
The public tracker shows progress, but not a finished product
Still, the development picture is a little less tidy than the headline timeline implies. IO’s public Leios tracker suggests the project remains in mid-development rather than in final approach.
The specifications appear to be largely complete, which is important, but actual testnet progress is shown at only around 24%. Other milestones in the tracker also suggest a roadmap that is advancing, though not especially quickly. The improvement proposal is marked around 75%, the technical specification near 70%, a showcase target for 1,000 TPS sits at roughly 57%, and the release candidate stage has not started.
That does not mean the timeline slips automatically. But it does suggest Cardano’s most important scaling upgrade is still some distance from production, even as the treasury vote asks the community to fund the next phase with more discipline than last year.
