Cardano (ADA) Launches Off-Chain Scalability Protocol

By Kapil Gauhar

Cardano, on March 25, released its off-chain protocol solution, Ouroboros Hydra, that scales more than Visa’s payment network, after 5 years of development.

Per the announcement, the off-chain scalability protocol majorly enhanced scalability and low the latency for the Cardano blockchain by using only a little storage on the network’s nodes. The solution additionally allows for the applications like micropayments, insurance contracts, voting, and other uses that need low fees or instant transactions.

As indicated by a spokesperson of IOHK, Hydra is the outcome of a 5 year European Union-funded collaborative research project, and might theoretically scale to a million transactions per second. According to him, such a throughput is in the excess of the current generation of global payment systems.

Each user, in Hydra, who connects to the network produces 10 heads, that are throughput lanes for data and transactions. Owing to that, the framework reportedly obtains faster and decreases its latency while it scales.

More Scalable Than Visa’s Payment Network

Simulations made by the University of Edinburgh show that every Hydra head can deal with around 1,000 transactions per second, however, as indicated by the declaration, the procedure can be additionally improved.

The announcement reads –

“With 1000 heads the network could theoretically scale to a million transactions per second – comfortably in excess of current global payment systems such as VISA.”

Moreover, as per the announcement, Hydra moves toward the theoretical maximum measure of transactions possible inside the limitations of geographical distance, network speed and the number of members.

The paper reads –

“Essentially, the bottleneck becomes the network connection between the participants, not the protocol.”

Scalability is Blockchain’s Sacred Goal

Aggelos Kiayias, the Director of Edinburgh University’s Blockchain Laboratory, commented on the development –

“Solving the scalability question is the holy grail for the whole blockchain space. The time has come to apply a principled, evidence-based approach in designing and engineering blockchain scalability solutions and this research is a decisive step in this direction.”

Ongoing proof suggests that the Ethereum Foundation abandoned its second-layer solution, Plasma, without reporting it.