IO: Consensus Initiative
248 DReps voted · 80 with a rationale
Open a row to read the rationale.
- Yes 20.3M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 19.9M ₳ Rationale
With Leios Cardano will be the first blockchain which can seriously claim to have solved the blockchain dilemma, which says it is impossible to solve decentralization, security and scalability at the same time. Cardano has never given up on this and Leios will solve scalability on the layer 1 without giving up any of the other two dimensions.
We all hope for rising adoption, we will need Leios to cope with that rise of adoption. - Yes 17.1M ₳ Rationale
IO: Consensus Initiative
- No 16.7M ₳ Rationale
I’m voting NO because this is a large, consensus-layer scaling program and the proposal does not provide the level of auditable cost transparency and governance-grade deliverable gating that should accompany a multi-million-ADA treasury withdrawal for protocol-critical work. While it outlines phased intent and acknowledges that activation is separate from delivery, that structure still needs to be paired with explicit staffing/FTE counts, rate assumptions, and concrete artifact-based acceptance evidence per milestone so the community can verify progress and benchmark cost efficiency. This is especially important because consensus changes impose ecosystem-wide downstream obligations (testing, coordination, alternative client alignment, SPO operational impacts) and those externalities should be explicitly quantified and managed, not left implicit. As a governance principle, consensus/scaling “roadmap completion” from a founding entity should not default to treasury funding when those entities were expected to use their long-standing resources (including genesis allocation) to deliver core evolution of the protocol. Finally, we are giving a process penalty for bypassing the Intersect Budget Process, which was specifically designed to address the gap in the process between proposers and Dreps. Bypassing the Intersect budget mechanism undermines comparability and price discovery for a major protocol spend, and founding entities should set the example by using the improved process rather than routing around it.
- No 16.4M ₳ Rationale
IO has been funded by a significant amount of premine tokens.
- Yes 14.2M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 14.1M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 13.3M ₳ Rationale
RCADA Rationale
RCADA votes YES on the IO: Consensus Initiative (Leios) Treasury Withdrawal proposal.
We support this proposal because we believe Cardano must continue investing in foundational infrastructure capable of sustaining long-term growth, adoption, and economic viability. While the Treasury ask is substantial and execution risk is non-trivial, RCADA believes Leios represents one of the most strategically important protocol initiatives currently under consideration.
At its core, this proposal addresses a fundamental challenge facing Cardano: scaling transaction throughput while preserving the decentralization, security, and stake pool economics that distinguish the network. Cardano’s long-term ambitions — including meaningful DeFi adoption, enterprise use cases, real-world assets, and increased on-chain activity — are difficult to achieve if throughput limitations become a bottleneck. Leios offers a credible pathway toward addressing this challenge without abandoning Cardano’s core architectural principles.
Importantly, this proposal does not seek immediate activation of Leios on mainnet, nor does it ask the community to pre-approve a future hard fork. Instead, it funds the work required to move Leios from public testnet toward a mainnet-ready release candidate, including engineering, conformance testing, ecosystem integration, adversarial validation, SPO readiness, and governance preparation. RCADA views this distinction as important. Supporting development readiness is not the same as committing in advance to activation. Any future hard-fork decision should remain subject to separate constitutional, technical, governance, and ecosystem review.
RCADA also recognizes several positive governance improvements within this proposal. Milestone-based disbursement, refund provisions for unused funds, third-party assurance, Intersect-administered smart contracts, and public auditability mechanisms all represent stronger Treasury accountability than many earlier funding proposals. The proposal also demonstrates meaningful effort toward ecosystem preparedness through workshops, infrastructure support, and implementation-independent technical documentation.
However, our YES vote should not be interpreted as unconditional endorsement.
This proposal requests a significant amount of Treasury funding, and RCADA believes large Treasury asks must meet an increasingly high standard of transparency and accountability. While the proposal provides stronger detail than many prior requests, we continue to believe clearer staffing assumptions, milestone-level cost attribution, measurable delivery indicators, and more granular resource allocation would improve confidence in Treasury stewardship.
We also recognise that Leios is an ambitious and technically complex undertaking. The proposal itself acknowledges meaningful execution risks, including Dijkstra-era timing dependencies, integration complexity, ecosystem readiness, parameter uncertainty, and governance dependencies required for eventual activation. Cardano’s high-assurance engineering approach has historically prioritized correctness over speed, but Treasury-funded initiatives must still demonstrate measurable progress and clear communication with the community.
RCADA further believes particular attention should be paid to Stake Pool Operator impacts as development progresses. Increased chain growth, operational requirements, hardware expectations, and network assumptions must be carefully validated to ensure Cardano’s decentralization and SPO participation remain healthy. Scaling should strengthen decentralization — not unintentionally erode it.
Ultimately, RCADA believes Cardano’s Treasury exists to fund meaningful ecosystem advancement where the expected long-term benefit justifies responsible risk-taking. While Leios carries execution uncertainty and warrants continued scrutiny, we believe the potential ecosystem value, strategic importance, and governance safeguards present in this proposal justify support at this stage.
For these reasons, RCADA votes YES, while emphasising the importance of milestone transparency, measurable delivery, SPO impact monitoring, and independent scrutiny prior to any future hard-fork activation.
RCADA's full vote assessment can be found here: "https://brolloks.github.io/rcada-drep-votes/."
- Yes 12.8M ₳ Rationale
I am voting YES on governance action 73e171a4c0730b4b59ecae271ab89f12a9d56360b02920e1f95107dbdc1d6762#2.
While Sundae Labs has been a consultant on Leios R&D work in the past, we have no ongoing consulting work, nor do we currently have the Haskell expertise required to deliver on this directly. Therefore, I do not forsee a direct conflict of interest.
I am voting yes on this, as I believe the capacity increase represented by Leios is essential, not just for ultimate sustainability of the protocol, but for the economic relevance of Cardano as a platform.
That being said, I have a severe criticism of this proposal in line with something I've been saying for over a year now.
Simply building increased capacity is wholly insufficient if nobody uses that capacity. We cannot simply take a "build it and they will come" appraoch to the delivery of Leios. This will shift the burden for demonstrating that value to already starved and resource constrained product focused organizations building on Cardano.
This proposal is severely lacking a clear, concrete, and budgeted line or plan for driving adoption of the chain in light of the improved capabilities.
IO is largely a technical organization, and so I recognize that their strengths may not be in business development or marketing. Other founding entities were supposed to carry that burden and (without arguing about specifics) have only done so to limited success.
However, that is exactly why IO needs to be clear about what their plan is for manifesting that expertise.
The request for funds here, and the steep allocation to developer resources, without so much as a "In conjunction with organization X", or "by hiring consulting firm Y" to address this is a major and concerning oversight.
IO doesn't need to be the entity, themselves, that is attracting businesses to build on Cardano in the wake of Leios; but in order to justify such a steep spend, they must have the mentality and plan to find the people who will:
- Run Hackathons or large scale stress test events to demonstrate capacity
- Secure MOU's from businesses who have previously been skeptical or unable to build on Cardano
- Offer small grants or technical consulting to businesses interested in trying the waters
And other such efforts.
I'm voting yes on this proposal because at the end of the day this is a correctable oversight, but the success of this initiative will ultimately be entirely contingent on this missing component. If there is any flexibility when drafting the legal contracts with Intersect for oversight of the funds, I strongly encourage reallocating a portion of funds to this half of the problem space, rather than expecting or hoping that others will solve it independently.
You can find a larger writeup justifying my vote here.
- No 12.2M ₳ Rationale
We recognize the strategic importance of Leios and agree that scalable consensus infrastructure is critical to Cardano’s long-term growth and 2030 ambitions. The work proposed appears technically valuable and likely necessary for the ecosystem.
However, we are unable to support this treasury withdrawal in its current form due to insufficient financial and operational transparency relative to the scale of the funding request.
The proposal allocates approximately 86% of the ₳27.7M budget to “Development,” yet provides limited detail regarding:
a. Team composition,
b. Staffing structure,
c. FTE allocation,
d. Subcontractor scope,
e. Work-package costing,
f. Milestone-linked budget mapping, or
g. Measurable cost justification.While we acknowledge that consensus engineering is complex and can be expensive, we currently lack enough information to independently validate whether the requested amount represents an efficient and accountable use of treasury resources.
Additionally, the proposal explicitly frames success around “hard-fork readiness” rather than guaranteed mainnet activation, increasing the importance of clear milestone accountability and transparent delivery metrics.
Our decision to vote “No” should not be interpreted as opposition to Leios or Cardano scaling efforts.
- Yes 11M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 10.8M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 10.5M ₳ Rationale
Voted YES on Consensus Proposal - which also supports BLOCKFROST directly (I DO understand why IOG keeps supporting companies owned by Charles indirectly/directly but this is NOT how it should be). But not with blind optimism. This is one of the few proposals in this cycle that I see as genuinely core infrastructure for Cardano's long term base layer competitiveness. If Cardano wants a credible path toward its own 2030 transaction ambitions, stronger L1 throughput,and better fee-generation capacity over time, then some version of Leios is likely necessary.
Cardano's own public materials make that case clearly -Leios is the planned path from Praos toward materially higher throughput, with public targets in the 10x or more range and roadmap work focused on moving from testnet/prototype toward release candidate and hard fork readiness.
There are real negatives here.
The proposal is much more specific than that. It funds:
a mainnet ready "release candidate"It explicitly does not promise that the mainnet hard fork itself will happen within the proposal scope. That depends on additional ecosystem readiness, governance timing and external dependencies. Voters should be aware about that.
Second, there is clear continuity with prior Leios funding. This is not Leios starting from zero. In prior budget cycles, IO already had Leios related funding in both core engineering and research streams. So this ask should be understood as a continuation of a multi-cycle effort, not a brand-new initiative. It means the community should expect strong carry over accountability from earlier phases into this one.
Third, the proposal is expensive. At the proposal's own reference pricing, the ask is about $6.65 million USD. Added to previously visible Leios specific funding, the known minimum spend is already substantial. That raises valid questions around total cumulative cost, staffing efficiency, and whether proposal level FTE and rate transparency should be better than it currently is.
Fourth, this is still a HIGH risk engineering program.
Even the proposal acknowledges risks around parameter assumptions, integration timing, Dijkstra-era timing, ecosystem readiness, and downstream dependencies. The implementation plan is mature but this is still cutting-edge protocol engineering - and this is not simpleFifth, there is downstream complexity for the wider ecosystem. Leios is not just "more throughput." It affects client interfaces, tooling and supporting infrastructure. That is why the proposal explicitly includes support for things like dBsync, Mithril and Blockfrost. This is another reason the community should NOT oversell the timeline or pretend the work ends when the core protocol code is ready.
So why did I still vote YES?
Because despite those negatives, this is one of the few proposals where the downside of not doing it is larger than the discomfort of funding it.
If the base layer does not materially improve throughput capacity, the chain risks falling behind its own ambitions and losing credibility as a platform for serious growth. Leios is not a nice to have. It is part of the core scaling path Cardano has already signaled publicly and architecturally.
- No 9.6M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 8.8M ₳ Rationale
私は、この提案に賛成します。Leiosの継続開発は、Cardanoが次の時代へ進むための重要な基盤になると考えています。特に、30〜65倍のスループット向上によって、DeFi、DApp、エンタープライズ利用など、より広範な実利用を支える可能性があります。一方で、SPOの運用コスト増加については慎重に見る必要があります。それでも、Cardanoが2030年に向けてスケールし、長期的な競争力を維持するためには、LeiosのようなL1コンセンサス層の改善は重要だと考えており、本提案を支持します。\n\nI support this proposal. I believe that the continued development of Leios will be an important foundation for Cardano as it moves into the next era. In particular, the 30–65x throughput increase has the potential to support broader real-world adoption, including DeFi, DApps, and enterprise use cases. On the other hand, the increase in operational costs for SPOs should be viewed carefully. Nevertheless, I believe that improvements to the L1 consensus layer such as Leios are important for Cardano to scale toward 2030 and maintain long-term competitiveness, and for that reason, I support this proposal.
- Yes 8.1M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 7.8M ₳ No rationale
- No 7.8M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 7.3M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 7.3M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 7.1M ₳ Rationale
This proposal builds upon the needs of Cardano's 2030 strategy, but more than that, it is just common sense. This proposal addresses one of the weak points of Cardano today. Cardano does not have the throughput for a large number of concurrent transactions (or transactions crammed in peak periods) - while preserving the traits that we value, such as decentralization. True, we are not at maximum capacity at this moment - however the global ambition that Cardano has in many spheres of financial applications do not correspond to the current abilities that Cardano has.
A global network that has the ambition of serving as an alternative financial infrastructure to be capable of serving more than the current ~800,000 transactions per month (as stated in the proposal) - has to be capable of delivering on its promise. If the current throughput is correct, that means that Cardano can currently serve one transaction per month for Bhutan - a country with a population of over 800,000 people. That's not a global financial OS.
Imagine a crypto revival - especially in countries suffering from fiat debasement - and Cardano manages to attract ten times more new users later this year. What will happen is we will again hit the congestion wall and disappointed users leave, while we go back to square 1 - asking ourselves why can't we process more L1 transactions.
Finally, Leios will probably change the way we and others view Cardano - but it will not, magically bring new users. This is more about getting to a robust Cardano 2.0 than immediate adoption. However, a resilient Cardano 2.0 with Leios will open up the possibility of new use cases. - Yes 6.2M ₳ No rationale
- Abstain 6M ₳ Rationale
I am voting Abstain.
I understand the importance of continuing to evolve Cardano’s consensus design over time, and I don’t question the long-term value of this type of work. However, this proposal reads as forward-looking research and improvement rather than something critical to the network’s immediate operation.
If this work were essential in the near term, I would expect it to be included within core maintenance efforts. As such, this feels more like an initiative to advance future capabilities rather than address a current constraint.
I don’t want to stand in the way if the ecosystem sees value in pursuing this now, but from a prioritization standpoint, I am not convinced this is among the most urgent areas to fund at this time.
- Yes 5.5M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 5.5M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 5.3M ₳ Rationale
Voting YES. Leios is the consensus upgrade Cardano needs to meet its 2030 transaction targets, and this proposal funds the disciplined path from working public testnet to mainnet-ready release candidate. The decision to enhance Ouroboros Praos through Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation - rather than replace it - preserves Cardano's security guarantees while unlocking 10–65x throughput. Praos stays as the proven foundation; Leios sits on top.
The scope is honest about what IO controls and what it does not. Hard-fork enabling is defined by completing the activities within IO's reach - stable client interfaces, technical documentation, SPO and developer workshops, tactical support for DB-Sync, Mithril, and Blockfrost, governance artifact preparation - explicitly not by the mainnet hard fork occurring. External dependencies are disclosed as risks, not buried as promises. Seven named risks with likelihood and severity, including the unflattering ones: medium likelihood that final node integration takes longer than expected, medium likelihood of community readiness gaps for the hard fork. Treasury stewardship is the same gold-standard Sundae Labs framework, with milestone-based disbursement, third-party assurance, proportional refund of unspent funds, and NCL compliance. Praos has earned the trust to extend it; Leios has done the testnet work to deserve the next stage.
Peter Horsfall - Independent DRep, Oceania.
- Yes 5.3M ₳ Rationale
STORM Partners votes YES on the IO Consensus Initiative.
Scaling remains one of Cardano’s clearest strategic bottlenecks, and Leios is a core path to addressing it. If Cardano wants to compete for higher-volume use cases across DeFi, payments, gaming, and enterprise applications, base-layer throughput needs to improve.
The proposal is expensive and does not by itself guarantee mainnet activation. Still, the work is necessary to move Cardano closer to credible high-throughput infrastructure. We support it while expecting transparent reporting on testnet progress, risk findings, and readiness for future governance decisions. - Yes 4.8M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 4.8M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 4.5M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 4.4M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 4.2M ₳ Rationale
[Portuguese]
Optamos por votar "SIM" nesta ação de governança "IO: Consensus Initiative" (gov_action1w0shrfxqwv95kk0v4cn34wylz25a2cmqkq5jpc0e2yrahhqava3qyxkn2yk), pois entendemos que o Ouroboros Leios é uma iniciativa relevante para preparar a Cardano para um novo patamar de uso, aumentando significativamente a capacidade transacional sem abrir mão da descentralização, da segurança do Praos e da viabilidade operacional dos SPOs. A proposta aborda um ponto estrutural para o crescimento do ecossistema: permitir que a rede suporte mais usuários, DApps, DeFi e casos de uso reais sem gargalos de capacidade. Embora o valor solicitado, de ₳27.714.342, seja expressivo, consideramos que o custo-benefício é justificável diante do impacto potencial sobre a infraestrutura base da Cardano e do alinhamento com as metas de adoção até 2030. Também pesam positivamente a definição de entregáveis por frentes de trabalho, o acompanhamento por marcos, a validação por terceiros, a liberação progressiva de recursos via contratos inteligentes, a transparência on-chain e a previsão de devolução dos valores não utilizados à tesouraria.
[English]
We chose to vote "YES" on this governance action "IO: Consensus Initiative" (gov_action1w0shrfxqwv95kk0v4cn34wylz25a2cmqkq5jpc0e2yrahhqava3qyxkn2yk), because we understand that Ouroboros Leios is a relevant initiative to prepare Cardano for a new level of usage, significantly increasing transaction capacity without compromising decentralization, Praos security, or the operational viability of SPOs. The proposal addresses a structural point for ecosystem growth: enabling the network to support more users, DApps, DeFi, and real-world use cases without capacity bottlenecks. Although the requested amount of ₳27,714,342 is substantial, we consider the cost-benefit ratio justified by the potential impact on Cardano’s core infrastructure and its alignment with adoption goals through 2030. We also view positively the definition of deliverables by workstream, milestone-based tracking, third-party validation, progressive release of funds through smart contracts, on-chain transparency, and the planned return of unused funds to the treasury. - Yes 4.2M ₳ Rationale
Prioritizing core development and strategic marketing is key to Cardano’s long-term success—build strong technology, drive adoption, and the price will follow. Leios is key to Cardano's success and adoption and to compete with other chains.
- Yes 4M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 3.8M ₳ Rationale
Critical upgrade work, but still have reservations because of the inappropriateness of direct treasury withdrawals without a proper procurement process pushing back on IO as part of requisite vendor management.
A PDF version of this rationale is also made available.
The Consensus Initiative addresses core protocol infrastructure and is clearly treasury appropriate. Consensus performance and scalability are foundational to Cardano’s long-term competitiveness and directly aligned with the roadmap. This is not discretionary ecosystem spending or market-facing experimentation; it is work on the core product itself.
I also believe the timing is appropriate. Throughput, latency, and overall network responsiveness remain one of Cardano’s major competitive weaknesses relative to other ecosystems. Whether fully fair or not, ecosystem perception around speed and responsiveness materially affects developer adoption, user retention, and broader market relevance. This is an area where Cardano cannot afford indefinite delay.
I view the underlying work as both valid and strategically necessary. Unlike some ecosystem initiatives where vendor ownership is more contestable, consensus-level engineering is one of the areas where IO’s historical knowledge and technical capability are genuinely difficult to replace in the near term. I do not believe this is realistically work that should be fragmented across multiple vendors at the current stage of ecosystem maturity.
My concerns are primarily around governance transparency and ecosystem impact analysis rather than the legitimacy of the initiative itself.
The financial allocation lacks sufficient granularity for a proposal of this size and importance. I would have preferred significantly clearer modeling around engineering allocation, milestone costing, operational assumptions, and expected resource utilization. Treasury governance should not normalize approving large protocol engineering budgets based primarily on institutional reputation.
I am also concerned that the proposal does not sufficiently disclose or model the potential downstream impact on SPOs. Consensus and performance changes can materially alter infrastructure requirements, hardware expectations, operational economics, and decentralization dynamics. Those tradeoffs should be explicitly analyzed and communicated as part of the governance process rather than treated as secondary considerations.
Overall, despite concerns around financial clarity and incomplete ecosystem impact modeling, I believe this initiative addresses a critical protocol weakness, is treasury appropriate, strategically necessary, and appropriately timed, which leads me to support it.
- Yes 3.7M ₳ Rationale
Leios is absolutely essential for Cardano’s long term scalability. I strongly support every effort to bring it to production as quickly as possible. It represents the final missing piece needed to fully resolve the blockchain trilemma and equip our ecosystem to meet the demanding requirements of the coming era of large scale commercial blockchain infrastructure.
==========================================
In general (and this applies to all IOG proposals), I firmly believe Charles is the most capable leader to guide Cardano into its next phase. With his experience, resources, technical knowledge, his army of developers, researchers and strong personal incentive for Cardano’s long term success, I will vote in favor of everything his company proposes. I wish we had even better alternatives, but we don't, cause there aren't any.
Since I am not a technical expert (particularly in this AI driven era), I will not pretend to fully evaluate the cost of these initiatives. That said, for a blockchain with a $10 billion market cap, an annual investment of approximately $40 million in core development does not seem excessive, especially in such a fast moving and highly competitive industry. Ultimately, this level of funding only makes sense if one trusts the incentives and capabilities of the person responsible for managing these resources.
I have also carefully reviewed the arguments circulating on X against funding IOG and find them unconvincing, as they never offer any viable alternative path forward. This includes the so called “conflict of interest” concerns regarding Midnight Ambassadors who are also DReps.
For transparency, I maintain close and regular communication with my 240 delegators through our Greek DAO Discord channel and update them via YouTube videos. They fully understand and expect me to ignore the social media noise, chaos, and paranoia, and instead follow common sense and what is genuinely best for Cardano. - Yes 3.5M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 3.1M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.9M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.8M ₳ Rationale
I am voting YES for this proposal, as Leios is an essential upgrade for Cardano and required for the continued lifespan of our blockchain.
What I am not happy about is that I was under the impression that Leios had already been funded, and now we are being asked to pay again.
This will be the last time Leios funding gets a yes vote from me, and I expect all deliverables to be fully completed. If they are not and Leios is not released for mainnet as stated, IOG will receive no further Yes votes from me in the future.
Also, in no way should any founding entity, like IOG or its founder Charles Hoskinson publicly attack and pressure Cardano community members and DReps into voting Yes for their proposals. This dishonorable and disrespectful behavior is unbecoming of any leader who wishes to be taken seriously and in turn granted respect.
If this behavior continues in the future, I will be downvoting every proposal by such entities who behave this way as a consequence. Please keep in mind that actions have repercussions.
I also do not appreciate IOG frontrunning the entire Intersect budget process with the intent of claiming the entire NCL for 2026 and leaving nothing for community builders.
- Yes 2.7M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.7M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.7M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.6M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.5M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.5M ₳ Rationale
Send it!
- Yes 2.5M ₳ Rationale
本提案は、Cardanoの2030年目標達成に不可欠なスケーリング基盤であり、Leiosによる大幅なスループット向上は戦略的中核である。Ouroboros Praosを拡張し分散性と安全性を維持する設計も高く評価する。加えて、周辺インフラ（DB-Sync、Blockfrost等）の対応やSPO運用負荷への配慮も重要であるが、これらをエコシステム全体で支援していく前提のもと、本提案に強く賛成する。
This proposal is essential for achieving Cardano’s 2030 goals, as Leios provides a critical scaling foundation with a significant increase in throughput. Its design extends Ouroboros Praos while preserving decentralization and security, which is highly valuable. Although readiness of ecosystem infrastructure (e.g., DB-Sync, Blockfrost) and SPO operational load are important considerations, I strongly support this proposal on the premise that the ecosystem will collectively address and support these challenges.
- Abstain 2.5M ₳ Rationale
I am Abstaining for now on this one.
I feel like a NO vote could be easily justified here due to the limited budget transparency.
With a clearer budget, I would be inclined to consider voting YES as Leios is a key piece of infrastructure that Cardano needs immediately.
- Yes 2.4M ₳ No rationale
- Yes 2.4M ₳ No rationale