Cardano developers launch Hydra L2 protocol on mainnet

The Cardano development company IOG announced the successful mainnet launch of the second-layer solution — Hydra.

Hydra is a family of layer 2 protocols designed to make #Cardano more scalable and adaptable for various use cases that require fast and cheap transactions. The first Hydra head recently opened on mainnet.

This video is a great starting point for exploring the current release,… pic.twitter.com/g1moYifGNj

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) May 4, 2023

The initiative is designed to make the network more ‘scalable and adaptable for various use cases that require fast and cheap transactions’.

Developer Sebastian Nagel noted that Hydra is the first of the protocols to help Cardano achieve the desired maximum throughput.

The solution will enable several new features, including micropayments and insurance contracts.

Work on the protocol has lasted more than seven years. At its core lies Hydra’s sharding technology, enabling significant Layer-2 scaling through the so-called ‘Hydra heads’.

Nagel explained that the integration of shards is not an upgrade and therefore does not require a hard fork. Preliminary tests showed that each of the ‘heads’ can process up to 1,000 transactions per second. With 1,000 pools using the technology, throughput would reach 1 million transactions.

According to Hydra’s white paper, the technology provides horizontal scalability by means of hardware improvements. In the developers’ view, this approach is the best compromise between speed, geographic distribution of participants and their number.

In May, the development team released Lightning Network update for the node-management tool Litd, intended to simplify the use of the network.