What is Leios?
This web site and the Leios R&D project are in their very early stage. More details will be added in the forthcoming weeks and months.
Ouroboros Leios is a novel protocol extending Ouroboros Praos that aims at dramatically increase the throughput of Cardano network. The core protocol and its theoretical properties are defined in this research paper.
In a nutshell
Leios is based on the key idea of input endorsers. Whereas in a classical blockchain, the blocks' body directly contains transactions, in Leios the blocks' body can also contain references to Endorser blocks which themselves contain references to so-called Input blocks containing the actual transactions. Those references are certified through a voting mechanism that guarantees a majority of validators agree on the content of Endorser blocks.
By decoupling the logic of validating blocks' payload and extending the blockchain, and limiting the work needed to verify the chain, much higher throughput can be achieved and new use cases can be unlocked.
Tell me more
More documentation about Leios can be found in the following sources:
- The Leios CIP by Duncan Coutts, providing rationale and a high-level design of the protocol
- The original Research paper is of course the main reference north star
- This video from Pr. Aggelos Kiayias, IOG's Chief Scientist, explains Leios in the context of Scaling Cardano
- One of the paper's co-author, Giorgos Panagiotakos, has shot a video explaining Leios
- These slides from Sandro Coretti-Drayton, another researcher that worked on Leios might also help getting a good intuition about Leios