$CAP-12 version 5, which remained open on Nov. 8, prohibits zero-valued Leios parameters, and Hammond’s network-wide shutdown route would use one.
Cardano keeps ordinary restart
The proposed switch is intended to disable Leios’s additional transaction-processing path while preserving ordinary block production. It would set maxEndorserBlockTxsSize, the limit on transaction payload endorsed by a supplementary block, to zero.
These endorser blocks reference additional transactions, which enter the chain after certification and inclusion of the certificate in a later ranking block.
For a Severity 1 or Severity 2 network issue, Hammond’s fast path would waive the PARAM-04a notice requirement and permit the transition to zero in any epoch.
Switching Leios back on would follow the normal process and remain subject to the network-group frequency limit.
Hammond said ratification and enactment would still take at least one epoch boundary, describing a boundary the action must pass.
$CAP-12’s analysis says Leios parameter changes require delegated representatives, the Constitutional Committee and a stake-pool-operator vote. Hammond separately distinguished that governance-controlled protocol switch from an operational switch based on ad-hoc operator participation.
Hammond made the protocol route conditional on written confirmation from the Linear Leios team about what zero does. No endorser blocks should be announced, no votes cast or diffused, and no certificates included in ranking blocks.
Node behavior should be equivalent to Praos, Cardano’s existing block-production system.
He also required switch-off and switch-back-on exercises on the Preview and Preprod test networks, with block production measured against the Praos baseline, plus conformance tests for the zero setting across all node implementations.
Constitutional permission to set a value would still need a matching implementation: clients must interpret zero consistently, and switching back on must work as intended.
Meanwhile, version 5’s MEBTS-09 rule expressly says the parameter must not be zero. Intersect’s Nov. 6 update confirms that the off switch was removed from the constitutional text, with deactivation left to the hard-fork plan and another draft expected.
Adopting Hammond’s route would require reconciling that ban with the proposed exception.
Testing and the constitutional timetable
The Nov. 3 working-group minutes say the test network entered the Dijkstra era on Nov. 2 using node 11.2, without full Leios implementation.
Intersect said on Nov. 6 that DijkstraNet supported BLS key registration but not full Linear Leios. Full Leios was available for early integration testing on Musashi, while the combined node 11.3 release candidate was estimated to be at least two to three weeks away.
The Nov. 3 consensus update reports endorser-block forging, certificate checks, and vote relaying. Essential Cardano’s Nov. 6 summary describes those main-branch changes as development work rather than a mainnet release.
The working-group minutes record an aim to submit the constitution and guardrails by Nov. 25.
Hammond also said on Nov. 6 that the Parameter Committee had not yet seen the pending numerical values and would need time to review them.
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