Project Leyden was created in May 2022 with the goal of improving footprint, startup time and time to peak performance of Java applications. Initially, a variety of different approaches were under consideration and the first proposed solutions only started to clarify around 18 months ago. An early preview of the 'premain' solution, prototyped by Oracle, was presented at the August 2023 JVM Language Summit. It has been under very active development since then, with a team that includes developers from Oracle, Red Hat, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, and has already delivered improvements to JDK and application startup time in OpenJDK 24 via JEP 483. The plan is for the project to deliver a series of JEPs that improve performance step by step rather than wait for a complete, shrink-wrapped solution and the Leyden team is already working on the next set of enhancements. In this talk we will explain what was delivered in JEP 483 and how it works to improve startup, then go on to describe what other features are in the pipeline. We will also touch upon some of the barriers we currently face to improving performance and ideas we are exploring to resolve them.