Cardano’s off-chain scalability protocol ‘Ouroboros Hydra’ makes it more scalable than Visa

Recently, Cardano released an off-chain scalability protocol known as ‘Ouroboros Hydra’ on March 25 after five years of development.

This off-chain scalability solution has the capability of handling 1 million transactions per second and can increase the scalability and transaction speed of the network while using only a little bit of on-chain storage.

Hydra scales more than Visa’s payment network

In Ouroboros Hydra solution, each user can generate 10 throughput lanes for data and transactions by connecting to the network as a result, the network becomes more scalable and faster.

This means that 1,000 throughput lanes will be created if only 100 users connect to the network enabling the protocol to handle 1 million transactions per second. This capacity of ‘Ouroboros Hydra’ is much more than the largest payment network of Visa.

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.

A spokesperson of IOHK – the firm behind Cardano- said that Hyrda solution has been developed as a result of a five-year European Union-funded collaborative research project.

Aggelos Kiayias, the Director of Edinburgh University’s Blockchain Laboratory, says while talking about this development that scalability is the holy grail for the whole blockchain space and says that this is the time to design blockchain scalability solutions by applying  a principled, evidence-based approach as he stated:

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.