After the crypto’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” is in the works on the new Alonzo hard fork to improve scalability and storage.
David Orr of IOHK claims in an explanation video that while Cardano can and does modify transaction fees to balance costs, it cannot keep transaction costs low enough for micropayments to be possible with just its base layer.
Cardano, he says, can’t handle the storage issues that will develop from the increased storage of transaction history on its layer 1 alone. As a result, Hydra is required.
According to IOHK, Hydra 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.”