The Cardano team has made significant progress on the long-awaited Hydra upgrade, which has been in the works for over a year.
In September 2021, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson announced on Twitter that a new project named “Hydra” is being developed on the upcoming Alonzo hard fork to increase scalability and storage.
Sebastian Nagel, a Cardano software engineer, announced the release of the first version of hydra-node, which can connect to the public Cardano testnet, today.
The team has successfully opened the first Hydra heads on the public Cardano testnet, according to Charles Hoskinson. He praised the team, calling it one of the Cardano Ecosystem’s fastest and greatest pieces of applied research.
While Cardano can and does change transaction fees to balance costs, David Orr of IOHK asserts in an explanatory video that it cannot keep transaction costs low enough for micropayments to be practical with just its base layer.
Cardano, he claims, will be unable to handle the storage challenges that will arise as a result of expanded transaction history storage on its layer 1 alone. Hydra, as a result, is necessary.
The Cardano community has been anticipating the Hydra upgrade, a layer-2 scaling solution, as it is expected to improve numerous parts of the network.
Surprisingly, the upgrade will enable transaction and smart contract parallel processing, comparable to Ethereum’s sharding or parallel blockchains.
Cardano’s development team has made substantial progress on Hydra, and the upgrade is likely to be launched later this year.
Since its all-time highs in early September 2021, the Cardano network token ADA has experienced turbulent times due to the delayed start to life of Cardano smart contract deployment and other variables.
However, attempts to enhance the blockchain and make it more effective in processing transactions are starting to resurrect the token, with the token climbing more than 35% in the last week.
As of this writing, ADA is trading at $1.073, up more than 10% on the day.