Earth phase, 6x mainnet throughput without even trying
TLDR
Earth, the first phase of MusashiNet, the Leios public testnet, asked whether the prototype holds in the wild. Forty-one days later, the answer is yes.
- Six times mainnet's ceiling. MusashiNet peaked at 26.8 TxkB/s with Leios active, against the 4.51 TxkB/s Cardano mainnet can reach with Praos alone. That's 6x mainnet's current maximum throughput.
- The whole protocol ran end to end, in public. More than 127,000 blocks, 30,000 endorser blocks announced, nearly 8,000 certificates on chain, 63 pools registered, and 10 releases in 6 weeks.
- Five incidents, zero design failures. A memory leak, two forks, frozen syncs, a one-byte serialization disagreement and a network-wide halt, all related to bugs, found and fixed in the open. The design proved to be correct.
- The red team is already inside. Piranha attacks the network with our published threat model in hand; so far Leios degrades in proportion to attacker stake, and the safety of the Praos layer remains untouched.
- Water phase just started. A fresh chain for parameter exploration, a redesigned mempool and real BLS keys, with the rewards program live, including retroactive rewards for pools that forged and voted in Earth.
Last time, we talked about why Cardano needs Leios and introduced MusashiNet, the Dojo where the protocol trains: five phases from Musashi's Book of Five Rings (Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void) and two swords, the short sword of Praos blocks and the long sword of endorser blocks. Earth, the first phase, has now closed. This is its story.
What Earth gave us
The Earth phase asked one question: does the prototype hold in the wild, at real latencies, on machines we neither control nor can see? Holding meant running the whole protocol end-to-end: Praos blocks produced, endorser blocks announced, the stake voting on them, certificates landing on chain. The numbers that follow are that checklist, ticked.
Forty-one days. More than 127,000 blocks, 30,000 endorser blocks announced, nearly 8,000 certificates carried on chain. Sixty-three pools registered over the phase, up from the three we started with, forty producing blocks in a single epoch at the peak. Twelve releases in eight weeks, an unbroken weekly cadence that absorbed two same-week hotfixes without missing the next release.
A young testnet has no traffic of its own, so we brought our own. The centrifuge, our synthetic load generator, was tuned to push slightly more transactions than Praos could clear on its own, and the protocol's settings stayed at cautious first values. It ran one hour on, one hour off. Twelve hours a day, every day, the network lived in the conditions Leios was built for.
That was enough for a first test of the design at a global scale. MusashiNet peaked at 26.8 TxkB/s with Leios active, against the 4.51 TxkB/s Cardano mainnet can reach with Praos alone at today's parameters. Six times today's ceiling, with the dials barely turned. In the final days of the phase, when things were more stable, Leios was carrying 54% of everything that reached the chain.
Compared with the traffic the mainnet actually carried over the same period, the Earth phase moved 18x the transaction count and 3.3x the bytes.