The Cardano community expects at least three major releases from the platform this year.
Cardano may have taken its pursuit of scalability to another level with its Hydra upgrade which is now live on the mainnet. The update was shared by Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the startup behind the Cardano protocol. According to IOHK’s Twitter advertisementThe first Hydra head on the main network has been opened.
For clarity, the Hydra head is the first member of the Hydra family protocol. According to the Cardano team, each head “serves as a small off-chain ledger that is shared among a small group of participants.”
Like many other layer one blockchain protocols, Cardano has been keen to prove its network dominance by improving scalability as well as expanding usability. Hydra provides the perfect solution to these needs.
Hydra Upgrade Benefits
The solution will allow developers to create specialized smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. It will help increase transaction speed by increasing throughput, which translates to the number of transactions per second (TPS). It will also help reduce transaction fees on the network to a minimum. Finally, the upgrade is expected to address security issues on the network and, most importantly, improve scalability capabilities.
Meanwhile, it might be worth noting that the Cardano community is expecting at least three major releases of the platform this year. After waiting a long time for Vasil’s upgrade last year, they are now anticipating releases that will cover stablecoins, scalability, and continued platform development for oracles. However, by launching on the mainnet, Hydra development appears to be a top priority for the Cardano ecosystem in 2023.
But Sebastian Nagel – one of the developers working on the Cardano Hydra protocol, hinted that there would be no need for a fork. This is because this is not a complete upgrade in and of itself. However, he maintains that Hydra’s head is the basic building block. That is, it is the foundation upon which other protocols that will help Cardano achieve scalability will be built.
L1 protocols compete
Without a doubt, there is unpaid scalability competition between Layer 1 protocols. This is as they race to position themselves at the top of the smart contract and decentralized finance (DeFi) space.
For example, the Ethereum network focuses on Layer 2 solutions such as Optimism (OP), Polygon zkEVM, and Arbitrum (ARB) to name a few.
Coinspeaker also recently reported that Mysten Labs’ Sui network issued a statement of its own. The protocol was launched on mainnet with a surprisingly high throughput of 300,000 TPS. Solana (SOL), Aptos (APT), and others are also constantly looking for ways to improve the performance of their networks.
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Mayowa is a cryptocurrency writer/enthusiast and his conversational personality is quite evident in his writing style. He strongly believes in the potential of digital assets and takes every opportunity to replicate it. He is a reader, researcher, skilled speaker, and budding entrepreneur. Outside of cryptocurrency, Mayowa’s imaginative diversions include soccer or discussing global politics.