At the beginning of 2026, the price of Cardano (ADA) experienced a noticeable rebound, rising from around $0.30 to nearly $0.40, with a staged increase of over 20%. This trend has once again brought the criticisms of "ecosystem stagnation" and "ghost chain" surrounding Cardano into focus. The market is more concerned with whether this rally is driven by short-term sentiment or if there are substantial changes in the fundamentals.

From recent information, one of the core catalysts is the confirmation of phased progress in the Leios upgrade plan. According to publicly available technical tracking data from IOG, the main improvements for Leios are approximately 67% complete, with overall technical design reaching 46%. Although aspects such as "verification of 1000 transactions per second" and testnet deployment are still in early stages, the roadmap is relatively clear. As a long-term scalability and performance upgrade plan expected to continue until 2026, Leios is seen as a key infrastructure for Cardano to break through performance bottlenecks and improve developer and user experience.