Cardano Report: New Smart Contract Features and Scalability Improvements

Cardano has released its weekly development report to provide a detailed overview of the improvements being made to the network infrastructure. Among the improvements being discussed were Hydra, Mithril, and Plutus — three core initiatives that are designed to make the Cardano blockchain increasingly high-performance.

Since it first launched in 2017, Cardano has been on the bleeding edge of blockchain development. The network was one of the earliest examples of a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism being used in blockchain, which, at the time, made Cardano one of the most efficient distributed networks in terms of processing transactions.

Hydra, Mithril, and Plutus are the latest upgrades to the Cardano network. Each of the three core developments focuses on a different area of the technology, and the weekly development report dives deeper into the progress being made on these fronts.

Hydra: Layer-2 scalability for the Cardano ecosystem

Hydra is a layer-2 scalability upgrade for Cardano. It’s expected to vastly improve efficiency for the network, with early forecasts predicting that Hydra could boost the number of transactions per second (TPS) to 1 million at peak capacity.

To achieve such a drastic improvement to the blockchain’s performance, Hydra will divide blocks into ‘subsets’, which can be processed independently by a number of validator ‘heads’. These heads, known as hydra nodes, are the subject of the Cardano weekly development report.

The weekly development report, released earlier today, stated that the Hydra team continues to make improvements to hydra-node performance. The team is considering how event-sourced persistence can be optimized, and has found a way to repurpose the necessary data snapshots into the protocol logic.

Mithril: Making Cardano more decentralized

A core aim of the Mithril upgrade is to make the process of running an independent Cardano node more accessible. Last week, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced that Mithril will soon go live on Cardano mainnet to provide a means of bootstrapping network infrastructure in a much more cost-effective way.

Previously, Cardano nodes could only be set up in one of two ways:

Firstly, users could download a full version of the Cardano blockchain, including every transaction that has been processed on Cardano in the past, and run a node independently on their personal computer.

Secondly, users could run a node using a third-party API, which essentially works by outsourcing the compute space to support the infrastructure without the need to shoulder the running costs.

Now, Mithril will improve the process of setting up an independent node without the need to outsource to a third party. Validators can download a lite version of the Cardano blockchain and run a node with reduced compute space. The Mithril upgrade can, therefore, allow a broader number of people to join the Cardano network and boost its level of decentralization.

Plutus: Optimizing smart contract development

Cardano is a Turing complete blockchain that supports the development of custom applications. Smart contracts are integral to the process of launching dApps on the Cardano blockchain, as they enable transactions to be automatically executed based on specific parameters that have been set by the developer.

Plutus, which is the name of the programming language used for Cardano-based smart contracts, continues to be optimized by the core development team. This week, Plutus smart contracts on the Marconi sidechain had runtime monitoring set up, response fields were added to indexers, and the standalone emulator functionality was explored in more depth.

Final word — Cardano continues to build towards a more decentralized and scalable future

The weekly development report released on 24th July 2023 has revealed that Cardano is making strides towards enhancing the performance of its technology. Security, scalability, and decentralization remain top priorities for the core team, and each of the three upgrades mentioned in the report target these pillars of blockchain in different ways.

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