Years of research yield Cardano’s second-layer scaling solution, Hydra, which promises to massively increase scale across its many “heads.” Cardano is bringing shards to its blockchain via Hydra, its latest innovation in scalability, IOHK founder Charles Hoskinson announced. Hydra is the result of five years of research and the efforts of more than two dozen team members, Hoskinson says.
Although the team published their initial build document in November and submitted their conference paper to USENIX in September, the document is now publicly available for the first time. Hoskinson adds that Hydra is a key part of Cardano's overall efforts to create Ouroboros , a scalable proof-of-stake protocol that is capable of sustaining performance as adoption grows. «The cornerstone of this entire research agenda is the Hydra Ouroborosa»Hoskinson said.
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What is Hydra by Cardano?
Hydra relies on state channels as a second layer scale solution. State channels fragment Cardano's without fragmenting the ledger itself, Hoskinson explains. More generally, state channels handle off-chain transactions, downloading transactions from Cardano's main blockchain. Together, these factors improve Cardano's transaction performance.
Hoskinson adds that Hydra “sit gracefully» on top of Cardano’s staking system. Each staking pool operator can operate its own Hydra state channel or “head.” Simulations suggest that each “head” can handle around 1.000 transactions per second. With 1.000 staking pools each handling 1.000 TPS, Cardano could achieve throughput of up to 1 million TPS.
Thanks to the higher transaction speeds, Hydra will support a faster transaction purpose, as well as more demanding activities such as micropayments and microtipping.
While research on Hydra has concluded, it still needs to be put into practice and optimized. IOHK is now building a Hydra team, which will code and deploy Hydra in parallel with Cardano’s other development stages. Hoskinson notes that Hydra developers won’t be “starting from scratch” thanks to the existing work done by Lightning Labs and other state channel researchers.
As one of the co-founders of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson is more than familiar with scalability issues in smart contract blockchains. The developers have been working to bring shards to Ethereum for years. If Hydra is implemented successfully, then Cardano could have solved the persistent scalability issues facing Ethereum and its challenges.
