- Cardano developers are working on a new decentralized payment system.
- Hydra Pay could evolve Cardano payments forever.
- Cardano’s upcoming decentralized payment system promises a throughput rate higher than one million TPS.
Cardano has long been trying to overthrow its competitors to become the ‘fastest and most scalable network in the world.’ Now with the inclusion of its Layer-2 solution Hydra, the Proof-of-Stake chain has cemented its status as a formidable contender.
Despite the scaling solution’s anticipation, adoption from Cardano DeFi protocols has been limited. To shake things up, the development team is all hands on Hydra Pay, a decentralized payment system that aims to reshape blockchain micropayments and attract DeFi development.
What Is Cardano’s Hydra Pay?
Hydra Pay is one of the few major innovations Cardano developers plan to deploy this year. The protocol enables near-instant payments by building on Hydra’s state-channel framework and its ability to replicate Cardano’s mainchain on an off-chain ledger.
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This way, Hydra Pay enables direct, peer-to-peer transactions off-chain without needing to process every transaction on the Cardano blockchain, resulting in swift, secure, and trustless settlements at low fees while maintaining functionality and security comparable to the main chain.
Since transactions are settled directly between users off-chain, Hydra Pay utilizes a unique proxy address structure that prioritizes consumer protection and throughput. Users escrow their funds on a smart contract or proxy address to complete transactions. The proof is then sent to the recipient, who verifies it and releases the funds instantly.
While Cardano has yet to reveal an official launch date for Hydra Pay, the protocol could introduce a myriad of possibilities to Cardano and showcase the capabilities of the underlying Hydra protocol.
How Would Hydra Pay Impact Cardano and Blockchain Micropayments?
Transaction finality, throughput, and fees are critical considerations for blockchain networks and pose consistent challenges to existing systems. Recent events, such as Ethereum’s struggle with memecoin mania and the Ordinal craze in the Bitcoin sphere, have been particular highlights of the limitations of existing systems in handling high volumes of microtransactions.
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Hydra Pay aims to revolutionize Web3 micropayments in response to these challenges by offering significantly faster and cheaper settlements. While developers have dismissed previous rumors about Hydra producing a throughput of one million transactions per second (TPS), the latest iteration of promise comes from Cardano Founder Charles Hoksinson, who claims Hydra Pay could achieve a “synthetically high TPS rate much higher than a million TPS.”
By leveraging Hydra Pay, dApps, games, and smart contracts can easily facilitate high-volume microtransactions while maintaining security, throughput, and low fees.
If things go according to plan, Cardano transaction volumes could spike significantly with Hydra Pay. Currently, Cardano already processes more than seven billion ADA daily, and the capabilities promised by Hydra Pay stand to push the limits of the network to new, unseen highs.
On the Flipside
- At press time, over 222,000 transactions remain unverified on Bitcon’s mempool.
- According to Ethereum Gas Tracker, users paid between $3,800 and up to $6,500 (some reported $14,000) to complete transactions on the Ethereum network during memecoin mania.
- Caradno only has 20 DeFi protocols on its network.
- It’s worth noting that Charles Hoksinson himself started the Hydra 1 million TPS rumor.
Why This Matters
Hydra Pay is on track to become the gold standard of decentralized payment systems. If all goes as planned, the solution could help Cardano realize its ambitions to seal itself as the world’s fastest, most scalable network.
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