Cardano Releases First Mainnet-Compatible Version Of Hydra-Node

• The scaling tool is part of a suite of products in Cardano for DeFi.
• It is an off-chain ‘mini ledger’ shared between small groups of participants.

Cardano’s node Hydra Head, a collection of layer-2 protocols designed to boost the scalability of Cardano, has gone live on the mainnet, the blockchain developers announced Thursday.

Hydra Heads allow developers to integrate complex decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Cardano – a part of the DeFi-upgrades released on the network this year.

Sebastian Nagel, one of the developers, shared the technical document describing how Hydra Head version 0.10.0 works: an off-chain ‘mini-ledger’ shared among a small group of users, which increases the transaction speeds and reduces fees.

‘‘After demonstrating Hydra Heads on the Cardano mainnet in recent monthly review sessions, we have released the first mainnet compatible version of Hydra-node today,’’ Nagel said in a series of tweets.

The first version of Hydra Head was released at the start of the month. With the successful deployment on the mainnet, Cardano developers have updated the API to accommodate the first batch of requests, preparing Hydra for real-world use cases. The next version, 0.11.0, is reportedly underway.

Cardano’s Series of DeFi Upgrades Unveiled This Year

This year, Cardano has focused on releasing upgrades targeting DeFi. In January, the network announced the launch of its decentralized stablecoin, Djed. It was followed by Lace Wallet, a platform that allows Cardano users to stake native ADA tokens.

Lace is similar to MetaMask, a browser-built wallet where users can access and operate Cardano-based decentralized applications, sending and receiving ADA, non-fungible tokens, and other digital assets. With Lace, multiple assets can be transferred bundled as one transaction and charged a single fee, significantly saving costs.

Besides, Cardano’s Ethereum Virtual Machine layer, Milkomeda, announced last March that it was integrating a feature enabling every Cardano user to access EVM contracts from Cardano wallets. EVM stores Ethereum accounts and smart contracts for deploying dApps.

The announcement of Hydra heads had caused an increase in the price of ADA by 2% at press time to $0.3652. But more importantly, as Cardano blockchain expands its capability for smart contracts and DeFi, experts project the price to rise even higher.