- Hydra has generated significant excitement in the Cardano community due to its scaling potential.
- The hype around Hydra has led to some overestimation of its capabilities.
- Following Hydraโs purportedly extraordinary numbers making headlines, a Cardano developer had to chime in.
- Charles Hoskinson has also spoken about Hydraโs inflated metrics in the past.
Hydra is Cardanoโs ticket to the big leagues with Ethereum and Bitcoin, and people are more than excited. The layer-2 scalability protocolโs ability to offer a more efficient solution compared to existing methods like sharding, the lightning network, and zkEVMs, has sparked a lot of interest.
However, the enthusiasm around Hydra has led to people getting a little too excited as they inflate its numbers to astronomical heights. Now, with Cardanoโs unnatural metrics making headlines one too many times, developers had to intervene and put an end to it, once and for all.
Fact or Myth
Following the launch of the Hydra protocol on the Cardano mainnet on May 11, the communityโs interest in the layer-2 scaling protocol grew rapidly, with discussion popping up on social media platforms, news articles, and public forums. A large part of the excitement centered around the protocolโs rumored bandwidth and performance capabilities of achieving transaction speeds as high as 1 million transactions per second (TPS).
Sponsored
The widespread celebration over Hydraโs purportedly extraordinary numbers led to Cardano Foundationโs Technical Director, Matthias Benkort, bursting the bubble by expressing his reservations on Twitter. The director cautioned against being swept away by the hype and highlighted the narrative of a 1 million TPS to be โmisleading.โ
The head of technology further emphasized that while Hydra is a beautiful engineering solution, itโs not โa magic wand.โ He shared that the rumors triggered him, and the Cardano Foundation has made much effort in the past two years to recover from this mistake.
Notably, discussions on Hydra’s purported 1 million TPS capacity have been going on for years. In fact, Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, has previously promoted and later refuted Hydra’s ability to achieve such impressive transaction throughput.
1 million or Not? Charles Hoskinson Answers
When recently asked about Hydraโs ability to achieve 1 million TPS, Charles Hoskinson dismissed the notion as โfatuous,โ explaining he didnโt know where the idea came from. However, the rowdy founder has previously claimed Hydra could achieve over a million TPS in his video introducing the layer-2 solution.
Despite the confusion, the Cardano founder has clarified that Hydra allows DApps to have both on-chain and off-chain components. The off-chain component allows for quick and cheap processing of transaction batches that would otherwise be on-chain. By doing so, Hydra significantly reduces on-chain consumption. Hoskinson adds that with 1000 of these Dapps using Hydra Heads deploying thousands of results from the off-chain component to the on-chain component, it could result in a 1000-fold reduction and ultimately a synthetically high TPS rate, much higher than a million TPS.
However, Hoskinson noted that this feature would be introduced later, and Hydraโs first generation focuses on moving Dapps to Hydra.
On The Flipside
- Cardano has increased its TVL by 172% QoQ from $50.8 million to $138.3 million. ADAโs market cap also rose by 54% QoQ from $8.6 billion to $13.2 billion. This increase moved Cardano from the 9th to the 7th largest network by market cap.
Why You Should Care
Cardanoโs Hydra is an intuitive scaling solution that brings a fresh and competitive concept to the blockchain space. However, enthusiastic and misinformed fans have overestimated its performance, leading to misleading information about Hydraโs capabilities.
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