Cardano's (ADA) community has been celebrating the launch of its one-of-a-kind layer 2 Hydra. Still, a seasoned developer has come to counter some of the actual capabilities of the new Cardano technology.
The developer said some bandwidth and tech specifications about the new Hydra are wrong and "misleading" for the Cardano community. He shared his views concerning the project details, saying the project developers should make corrections to the project data.
What is Hydra?
Hydra is Cardano’s own Layer 2 solution which is similar to that of Ethereum's Optimism or Arbitrum. This layer 2 solution aims to make transactions on the Cardano blockchain faster and more efficient. In a blog post, the project developers explained how Hydra would work to bring more positive changes to the blockchain.
"Hydra is a layer 2 scalability solution that seeks to address all these concerns and aims to maximize throughput, minimize latency, incurring low to no costs, and greatly reducing storage requirements," Hydra developers said.
They said Hydra would achieve this objective "By providing more efficient means of processing transactions off-chain for a set of users while using the main-chain ledger as the secure settlement layer, Hydra keeps security guarantees while remaining loosely coupled to the main chain. Not requiring global consensus, it can adapt to a broad range of applications. For example, Hydra allows Tx fees and minimum UTXO Value to be configured as low as 1 or 2 lovelaces, critical to microtransactions and the use cases these unlock."
Million Transactions per Second a Myth for Cardano's Hydra
According to Cardano Foundation's Tech Director Matthias Benkort, the narrative that Hydra can process about 1 million transactions per second should be kept private. He termed the 1 million Cardano tps Hydra as false and misleading.
Matthias Benkort made this claim on Twitter while countering a narrative pushed by a user who claimed to be a Cardano community builder. Named Marco Meerman, the Twitter user said, "Hydra is a layer-2 scaling solution that aims to allow #Cardano to process up to 1 million transactions per second, as it pivots to become one of the fastest and most efficient blockchains in the market.
Matthias Benkort immediately countered the statement saying that the project does not have the capacity to handle such transaction volume. He termed the narrative being spread by Marco Meerman as "misleading" and should be stopped. "No it is not. Please stop spreading the "1 million tps" narrative 🙏, it is misleading," Benkort replied.
Hydra Now live on Mainnet
After much anticipation by the ADA community, the layer 2 scaling solution has finally gone live. The launch of the mainnet happened on the 12th of May, 2023, and developer Sebastian Nagel confirmed it. After its launch on the 12th, Hydra witnessed the first activation of its node on the same day.
The project developers have always highlighted the numerous opportunities the Cardano ecosystem will get from this project. It was said to help increase the rate of transactions on the blockchain and subsequently increase Cardano's price and value in the long term. Before the project's official launch, its developers consistently shared how the Cardano blockchain would benefit from it.