Recently, Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO of IOHK, the company responsible for building Cardano ($ADA), gave an update on the progress of layer 2 scalability solution Hydra. 

As IOHK explained in a blog post published on September 17, here are the concerns that Hydra aims to address:

“In a blockchain network, a consensus algorithm creates a secure and trustless environment by ensuring agreement on a transaction history. Cardano uses Ouroboros, an efficient proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, for this very purpose. But Cardano also, just like any permissionless blockchain, faces challenges when trying to scale to achieve the throughput required to support applications in the real world, including payment, identification, game, or mobile services…

“Cardano transactions incur fees. The people who run the network (in the case of Cardano, the stake pool operator community) need to be rewarded appropriately for the part they play, so fees need to be set at a sustainable level. Users want to pay fees they deem acceptable. In addition, the blockchain needs to be protected against Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, for example.

“Fees can therefore not be set so low as to open up undue risk – DoS events must be made prohibitively costly to a potential attacker. Storage is also a concern, as an ever-growing transaction history can lead to storage problems. Effectively, the most successful blockchains risk becoming ‘victims’ of that very success.“

On October 30, during a “Surprise AMA” session (from Ethopia), Hoskinson said that development work on Hydra is “going very well”. More specifically, he said:

“We are going to keep adding resources to Hydra, and we’ve been trying to identify some teams so we can parallelize the workstream because it’s such a high commercial priority. And it’s going to be very important that we’ll be able to offload a large number of the transaction traffic that’s going to come from all of the apps that are coming.“

According to a report by The Daily Hodl, Hoskinson also offered this update on Cardano’s ERC-20 converter tool:

“[The] ERC-20 converter has two targets. One is the main chain. Now that Plutus is here, we can actually do a lot of cool stuff with that. The other is going to be Mamba. So the ERC-20 converter team is going to be shaken up and augmented a little bit. We’re going to add more resources to it, and we’re going to have a really nice two-way bridge tool for Mamba, because you’re going from ERC-20 to ERC-20, Solidity to Solidity. So it’s much easier to do that.“

The following day, Altcoin Daily” pointed out that Cardano’s total number of transactions, number of transactions per day, and total fees per day (in USD) are all trending upward:

And finally, earlier today, Cardano reached an important milestone: over two million $ADA wallets.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.