Cardano’s Hydra Could Beat The Lightning Network And Here’s How

Cardano’s hydra could beat the lightning network as It promises more scalability and interoperability and will also offer a better layer 2 experience so let’s read more today in our latest Cardano news.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson pointed to a link to the Hydra website and the website contains node installation instructions as a quick start guide with the demo content. Dubbed by Input-Output as the ultimate Layer 2 scalability solution so Hydra will improve the performance of the chain and will support growth and adoption via increased capacity. What’s more to it, the launch of Hydra will add a  new dimension to Cardano similar to the LN for BTC but better according to Hoskinson.

Haskell Dev Matthias Benkort noted that hydra is moving closer to a testnet and many assumed this means a sooner than expected rollout of the protocol. Fast forward to today, it seems a final version will launch soon and Cardano’s Hydra means a scaling solution to boost throughput, minimize latency, and incurs low to no costs in reducing storage requirements. It will achieve this by utilizing a process dumped isomorphic scaling that will work by processing transactions off the main chain and will reserve the main chain as a secure settlement layer.

These isomorphic state channels help Cardano to function as a native asset and NFTs and Plutus scripting are available within each head. The users get the benefits and security of the Layer 1 chain in a sharded head out of which there will be many:

“These are state channels that are capable of expediently reusing the exact state representation of the underlying ledger and, hence, inherit the ledger’s scripting system as is.”

Speaking to Lex Fridman, Hoskinson described Hydra as a layer 2 solution for scaling, and the co-designed in this sense is a special provision in place to accommodate Hydra, unlike the LN which was not co-designed with BTC. The Benefits of the co-design are a way to move in and out of the system while maintaining security properties. The sophistication came with separate heads alogn with the expressive accounting model and the result is that it is possible to do more like building safeguards against the lost funds:

“So instead of always being aligned and always being available, what happens if they [the head and tail protocols] die for a bit and then they come back? And you can create all kinds of guarantees that your funds won’t be lost or locked forever or things like that. There’s a failure recovery mode for this type of stuff.”