Cardano Outpaces Visa with Hydra’s 15.5 billion Transactions in a Day

Cardano has shattered transaction records in a groundbreaking feat, processing an astonishing 15.5 billion transactions within 24 hours using its Hydra scaling solution.

This milestone underscores the blockchain’s scalability and surpasses traditional financial giants such as Visa, which processes an average of 700 million transactions daily.

First introduced in March 2020 as part of Cardano’s scaling roadmap, the Hydra protocol is a layer-2 scaling solution designed to enhance Cardano’s transaction throughput significantly. On February 23rd, during the highly publicized Hydra Doom tournament in Las Vegas, Hydra demonstrated its full potential by processing an unprecedented volume of transactions, proving its capability to handle real-world use cases at massive scale.

Hydra is designed to address blockchain scalability by enabling multiple Hydra heads (off-chain processing units) to execute transactions in parallel. This horizontal scaling mechanism allows Cardano to accommodate increased network demand without compromising decentralization or security.

“After just 24 hours, we had processed 15.5 billion transactions… It was such a good demonstration of just how well scaling solutions like Hydra work because one of the main strengths of Hydra is that you can scale it up horizontally.” Trym Make Bruset, Product Manager at IOG, stated on Wednesday.

The Hydra Doom tournament, an event featuring the classic 1993 Doom game running on Hydra’s smart contracts, provided an innovative way to test the network’s scalability. The game functioned by submitting each gameplay frame as a smart contract transaction, processing at a rate of 35 frames per second. This setup significantly strained the system, yet Hydra successfully executed all transactions without delay.

“We actually ended up getting the id Software game Doom from 1993 to run on Hydra, which meant that for each individual frame, we were submitting a smart contract transaction into the Hydra head,” Bruset explained. “On December 3rd, we managed to get to 1 million transactions per second and even surpassed it.”

One of the world’s largest payment networks, Visa processes approximately 24,000 transactions per second (TPS) at peak capacity. Hydra’s performance, reaching over 1 million TPS, dwarfs Visa’s capabilities, highlighting the transformative potential of blockchain technology.

Beyond transaction speed, Hydra’s decentralized structure offers additional benefits over centralized payment processors. The ability to seamlessly distribute prize funds on-chain during the tournament further demonstrated Hydra’s real-world utility, eliminating traditional banking delays.

That said, with this historic breakthrough, Cardano has solidified its position as a leading blockchain for scalability and efficiency, challenging traditional financial networks and paving the way for widespread adoption.