Cardano's ecosystem has seen significant developments over the past week, but its native token ADA price failed to rally. One of the major milestones was the launch of Leios public testnet on June 23, which is a next-generation scaling protocol. This upgrade aims to boost Cardano's transaction throughput by up to 65X and is structured into five phases: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void.
The rollout allows stake pool operators (SPOs) to deploy Leios-enabled block producers, while developers can begin testing decentralized applications (DApps), wallets, and infrastructure ahead of the upgrade. A mainnet hard fork is targeted for November 2026.
Additionally, Input Output Global (IOG) announced that Phase 1 of its RealFi testnet will launch on July 6. This project aims to improve capital efficiency by enabling stablecoins to generate yield instead of remaining idle and represents IOG's latest effort to expand decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases within the Cardano ecosystem.
Project Catalyst, a community funding program, will return in August with a 2 million ADA grant pool. The upcoming funding round will prioritize projects building around technologies such as Pyth, Brale, stablecoins, programmable tokens, and on-chain identity.