Cardano Founder Recommends Leios and Hydra as Solana Stutters Under Pressure

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson suggests that the blockchain network he founded could handle volumes better than Solana at no additional cost to app builders.

Amid surprise meme coin launches from President-elect Donald Trump and now the incoming First Lady Melania Trump, the Solana network has seen significant traffic over the past few days.

While this traffic has boded well for the price of SOL, the network’s native token, it has also revealed current cracks in the network’s infrastructure, leading to several reactions online, including from the founder of Cardano, a competing blockchain solution.

Cardano Can Do Better?

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has suggested that the blockchain network he founded could handle volumes better than Solana at no additional cost to app builders amid issues faced by traders trying to purchase Trump family-inspired meme coins.

“This is why Leios and Hydra were developed. Surges like these can be handled naturally and without disruption or added cost,” Hoskinson wrote in an X post on Monday, January 20.

This is why leios and hydra were developed. Surges like these can be handled naturally and without disruption or added cost https://t.co/pHapJ8wYSz

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) January 20, 2025

Leios is a proposed upgrade to Cardano’s consensus mechanism that promises to significantly improve the network’s throughput by separating transaction processing from network consensus. In September 2024, Hoskinson tipped Leios to make Cardano faster than Solana.

Hydra, on the other hand, is a Cardano scaling protocol that can be integrated by DApps and Layer 2 chains for parallel transaction processing.

Hoskinson’s assertion on Monday came in response to statements from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong suggesting that the exchange was working to upgrade its Solana infrastructure to meet the current surge in demand as users complained of transaction delays.

Beyond Coinbase, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron also complained of failed Moonpay and Jupiter transactions as he attempted to purchase the Melania Trump meme coin. The former is a crypto on-ramp, while the latter is a popular Solana decentralized exchange.

Despite Hoskinson’s claims that Cardano has the potential to address the issues faced by Solana, there is one catch.

Still in Development

Leios and Hydra, the scaling solutions talked up by Cardano’s Hoskinson are still in development with no clear timeline for a mainnet launch.

All that is known about Leios’ progress is that it is currently in the hands of a prototype team.

As for Hydra, Cardano recently put the protocol’s potential on full display with a gaming competition that saw it smash throughput records. Still, work to bring the protocol’s functionality to DApps and Layer 2 chains appears far from over.