Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today's a special day. It is June 23rd, 2026, and as we said, the Leios testnet is here. Rather than just tell you, I'm going to do a reaction video to one of our own videos. So, let me go ahead and bring up a video of our good friend Carlos from the Leios team. You guys ready? Excited? Filled with some joy? All right, we're going to maximize that. We're going to just play this video.
>> Cardano is always known for its security, for its high assurance, but not so for its throughput. Well, we're going to fix that. Oh, look at this box. Leios is the scaling solution for Cardano. We started one year ago from a research paper from IOHK research and brought it up to a prototype implementation. Now, we're going to put this prototype implementation into the testnet so that you, the community, can come and actually test it, use it, and break it. We need SPOs. We need builders. We need dApps involved in this testnet because you guys are the ones that are going to tell us how it feels, where it breaks, and what fails. That will help us iterate over and over so that by the end of the year, we have this beautiful piece of software that we are ready to put in mainnet.
Cardano started in Japan. The Japanese tradition and culture are running through the veins of Cardano. We are naming this testnet Musashi Dojo.
>> Yeah.
>> A space where the protocol, the community, the engineers, and the developers will come together to actually train for Leios. Musashi developed his style of fighting with two swords, one long and one short, based on the idea that no single tool works well in every condition. Lace works with two blocks: one short block and one long block. It's the same principle for chain code. Miyamoto Musashi wrote a book called The Book of the Five Rings. It's about strategy, adaptation, and learning. We are naming the phases of this testnet after each of those chapters from his book. We are really proud of what we have achieved. We have built the most secure blockchain in the space, and now we are equipping it with a throughput that can make it the operational system for the world. From the Musashi Dojo, we want the community to take away the high confidence that we will need for going to mainnet. Each phase is rehearsed under tighter and tighter conditions. Then mainnet is when we step into the ring with everything we have learned. So, join the Musashi Dojo and train with us. Your feedback, your experimentation, even your adversarial attack, will be critical for the success of Lace and Cardano. So, please join the Dojo and train with us.
>> [music]
Ah, so good. So good. How about that? Age of Lace. Got it done. It was a long time coming. We put so much work into this—10 years. I was in Corfu, Greece, and we had just implemented RS Coin from Seramikol, John, and George Denesis. We came up to Aggelos. He didn't even work as Please, sir. Please, we want to do a new proof-of-stake paradigm. We want it to be provably secure and have the properties of Bitcoin. He said, "Huh, such a thing is impossible. Probabilistic proof-of-stake, sir. It can't be done." I said, "Come on, let's do it. Let's figure it out." And we got it done.
Oh man, I'm stoked. I'm hyped. This is long overdue. We put so much time, effort, and money into this as an ecosystem. It's really just an amazing moment. I'm really proud of the team. So, to Carlos and the countless hundreds of people all the way through the eras from Duncan Coutts to Sebastian Nagel, thank you for making this day happen. It's real special to all of us, and there's a lot of love that went into this.
We have the five rings. We have the five eras of the Musashi testnet. They'll go quick. And you know what to do. You might be asking, "Where do we do it, Charles? Where do we do it?" Well, I'll show you where to do it. There's a dedicated, cool, badass samurai website to do it on. How about that? musashi.network. And I'll give you guys the link.
Da da da da da da. Wah. Okay. And of course, you have that lovely video. For stake pool operators, for builders, there's documentation, the faucet, and you can see all the different groups of people that worked together. Blink was instrumental. Real thanks to their team, as was the team at Takes Five Sunday. CF worked really hard. Real thanks to the Amaru team as well. It's just a great moment. This is the solution to the blockchain trilemma. It's long overdue, and we earned it as an ecosystem.
I understand that today there was the second five thing, and there's always something you can focus on that's negative if you want to. To those impacted, it's a bad day. But when you widen the aperture a little bit, you can always find some win or something positive or something fun to focus on. In this particular case, if you're part of Cardano, you're part of something that is 10 years in the making. It predates the launch of Ethereum. This agenda really is the best consensus protocol ever conceived, given all the different requirements. It's self-healing. It's telescoping, so you can always add new things to it. There's a tick-tock schedule for scale here on after. With Paris, you get fast finality. With Chronos, you can decouple NTP. With Cryptsinus, you can add a privacy layer to it if desired. With Minotaur, you can go multi-resource. We can go in any direction. It's provably secure, and it has eight years of 24/7 operation time. Even when we faced a hit like the soft fork last year, the network healed itself. It's not perfect, but it's the perfect culmination of research, engineering, and product together.
Paired with extended UTXO and the future of where Star Stream and other things with extended UTXO can go, this really is a planet-scale system. I know the markets aren't so good, and everybody's in a bad state about that, thinking the best days of crypto are over. But winter will pass, and spring will come again, and the flowers will blossom. The question is, what's going to be left behind? It's going to be two groups of people: a lot of people who chose the easy path and didn't survive or became the antithesis of everything we stand for as an industry, and those who endured the winter but kept their principles. On the other side, we're going to be stronger for it.
Cardano's built on granite. It's solid, it's strong, and I'm proud of all the people here. I'm glad that this research-driven approach was not only able to deliver this, but it was done for the first time ever with such a broad spectrum of partners. From the bottom of our hearts at Input Output, I want to thank every one of them for this moment. This is your day.
We have a lot more work to do, and there's a lot of you who have to come and work with us on this one. But just take a moment today to celebrate and say, "Hey, we did something good. We said the 23rd, and we got it done." I'm really proud that we have this testnet, and here's to all the ones that come after. Cheers, everybody.
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