Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced a Layer 2 scalability solution for the Cardano blockchain following the Alonzo implementation a week ago.
- Charles Hoskinson said they are developing a solution at Alonzo to improve scalability and storage.
- The ‘Hydra’ solution could make transactions on the Cardano blockchain take less than a second to complete.
- IOHK highlighted that the network has a roadmap for future governance through Voltaire and maximum scalability through Basho and Hydra.
Hydra is The Cardano Layer 2 Scalability Solution. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson outlined via a live broadcast on YouTube that they are developing a solution for Alonzo to improve scalability and storage.
In this regard, IOHK, the developer of Cardano, notes that the “Hydra” solution could make transactions on the Cardano blockchain take less than a second to complete.
A Layer 2 scalability solution
David Orr, a member of the IOHK team, explained that while they plan to improve Cardano’s fees to balance user costs, they probably won’t be low enough for “real-world use cases.” He further noted:
“Hydra is a Layer 2 scalability solution that seeks to address these concerns by providing more efficient means of processing off-chain transactions for a set of users while using the mainnet as a secure settlement layer.“
Subsequently, the IOHK team added:
“Terms like ‘one million TPS (transactions per second)’ have been used before. It’s a bold number, and while it remains an aspirational goal, the ultimate goal of any system is the flexibility to increase capacity with demand […] In principle, by adding an increasing number of Hydra heads to the system, the system as a whole can achieve arbitrarily high throughput.“
Following the implementation of Alonzo, IOHK highlighted that the network has a thriving NFT ecosystem, a roadmap for future governance through Voltaire, and maximum scalability through Basho and Hydra.
Ethereum Layer 2 Solution
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has made it a personal mission to find solutions to network saturation. The high demand for non-fungible tokens (NFT) is causing it and driving fees through the roof.
Buterin has proposed migrating NFTs to second Ethereum layers, such as rollups. He would not do this to a single rollup but through an interoperability system that allows more rollups to use NFTs.
The rollups are second-layer solutions that basically “roll up” multiple transactions into one and thus allow a more significant number of transactions per second (TPS) to be processed outside the leading Ethereum network. For example, zkSync 2.0 rollups, which are currently in the testing phase, promise to process up to 20 thousand TPS, while the mainnet only processes between 12 to 20 TPS in its current state.
Alonzo and ADA pricing update
Last Sunday, September 12, Cardano developers officially enabled the Plutus Smart Contract capabilities on the mainnet following the implementation of the Alonzo upgrade. Thus, Cardano can now accept Smart Contracts, one of the most awaited requirements by the community. Despite the high expectations for Alonzo, Cardano’s native token has not reacted similarly.
When publishing this post, ADA was trading at $2.12, down 10.58% in the last 24 hours and headed down nearly 11.71% in the previous seven days, according to CoinPaprika market data.