Cardano’s Hydra Hits 1 Thousand TPS in Testing Phase, Outperforms Visa, Mastercard and PayPal
Cardano’s Hydra protocol has achieved a landmark performance milestone, recording one million transactions per second (TPS) during recent testing. This throughput surpasses the combined processing capacity of...

Cardano’s Hydra protocol has achieved a landmark performance milestone, recording one million transactions per second (TPS) during recent testing. This throughput surpasses the combined processing capacity of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal.
The development is a major leap in Cardano’s ongoing scalability roadmap, making Hydra one of the most powerful layer 2 blockchains.
According to a post by Cardanians.io, the Hydra Doom test demonstrated the protocol’s ability to process more transactions than leading global payment networks, with VisaNet itself peaking at roughly 65,000 TPS. The milestone highlights Cardano’s expanding technical capability to handle real-world, high-frequency transactions at unprecedented speeds.
Hydra is a layer 2 scaling protocol built on peer-reviewed research and designed to increase throughput and cost efficiency while maintaining Cardano’s hallmark security standards.
Each “Hydra Head” functions as an off-chain ledger between participants, enabling faster and cheaper transactions without overloading the main blockchain. This design allows developers to deploy customized protocols and applications atop the Cardano network.
The recent release of Hydra 1.0.0 officially transitions the project from testing to production readiness, making it suitable for live deployment. The update brings improved transaction speed, reduced fees, and enhanced flexibility for developers through partial deposits and refined API responses.
The Hydra upgrade also integrates with Cardano node version 10.4.1 and Mithril version 2524.0, ensuring compatibility with the latest ecosystem infrastructure.
Despite minor ongoing challenges related to data fanout, developers say Hydra 1.0.0 lays the foundation for large-scale adoption.
The update enables developers to build decentralized applications capable of real-time payments and high-speed operations without congestion.
Hydra’s evolution complements Cardano’s broader roadmap alongside Starstream, an upcoming privacy-focused framework leveraging zero-knowledge technology. The two systems are expected to merge high-speed performance with confidential smart contracts, supporting Cardano’s dual focus on scalability and privacy.
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