The Hydra Upgrade for Cardano aims to boost blockchain scalability -

The Hydra Upgrade for Cardano aims to boost blockchain scalability while also enabling enterprise use cases like DeFi

After the Cardano’s mainnet was upgraded last week, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) said that it is working on a layer-2 upgrade for Cardano’s blockchain.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson informs his 690,000 Twitter followers that a new project called Hydra upgrade is in the works on the latest Alonzo hard fork to increase scalability and storage.

While IOHK plans to improve Cardano fees in order to balance user prices, stake pool operator profits, and network security, David Orr of IOHK notes that they are unlikely to be low enough for “real world use cases,” which is what Hydra upgrade hopes to address.

“Hydra is a layer-2 scalability solution that seeks to address these concerns by providing more efficient means of processing transaction off-chain for a set of users while using the main chain as a secure settlement layer…
Hydra maximizes throughput, minimizes latency, incurring low-to-no cost, and greatly reduces storage requirements.”

Hydra, according to Orr, can lower the entry barrier for clients that wish to build items on the Cardano network, such as wallets or applications.

According to IOHK, Hydra upgrade could make Cardano transactions take less than a second to complete.

“Terms like ‘one million TPS (transactions per second)’ have been used before. It is a bold number, and while this remains as an aspirational target, the ultimate goal of any system is the flexibility to grow capability with demand… In principle, by adding increasing numbers of Hydra heads to the system, arbitrarily high throughput can be achieved by the system as a whole.”