Cardano’s Hydra Sets New Record with 1 Million TPS

Cardano’s Layer-2 protocol Hydra reached a significant milestone of surpassing 1 million transactions per second (TPS) during its Doom gaming tournament.

On Dec. 4, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, shared screenshots confirming that the network had crossed the 1 million TPS mark globally. This achievement is part of the ongoing tournament to test Hydra’s scalability.

Hoskinson explained that the high TPS is driven by each game frame being processed as a transaction. This demonstrates Hydra’s ability to handle substantial transaction volumes.

While the official data shows a current TPS of 507 and a peak of over 807,000, these numbers are still far ahead of competing blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum. For context, Hydra’s test outperformed Solana’s theoretical maximum TPS of 65,000 by over 100x, according to Chainspect.

Hydra’s potential

Advocates like Josh Marchand, a software engineer at Sundaeswap (a decentralized exchange on Cardano), emphasized that Hydra’s value lies in its limitless scalability potential. He stated:

“1m is just an arbitrary number. The truly exciting part of Hydra is the limitlessness. The beauty of Hydra is that you could horizontally scale your system until you run out of silicon (or AWS vCPU units, in our case).”

However, critics like crypto analyst Goku pointed out that the transactions processed during the Doom tournament were not settled on Cardano’s mainnet but were part of a testnet simulation.

Hydra, launched last year, is a Layer-2 scaling solution designed to enhance Cardano’s scalability by increasing transaction speeds and throughputs while reducing latency and costs.

Despite facing some criticism, Hoskinson has defended Hydra’s progress. The Doom tournament, however, has proven to be an effective showcase, drawing players worldwide to experience Hydra’s capabilities.

Bullish Cardano ecosystem

The development coincides with a strong market trend for Cardano, which has climbed significantly over the last few weeks.

Based on CryptoSlate data, ADA is up more than 250% over the past 30 days, reaching a two-year high of over $1.29 before a retracement kicked in. The token was trading at $1.18 as of press time.

The Cardano network is also seeing an uptick in DeFi activity, with the total value locked on the platform nearing a record $700 million. These advancements come as the platform continues to advance its decentralized governance efforts.

Cardano Foundation stated that ongoing discussions at the Constitutional Convention emphasize the importance of community-driven decisions and reflect their efforts to build a more robust and resilient ecosystem.