Cardano Developer Says Hydra Cannot Handle 1 Million TPS

While Hydra is expected to improve the capabilities of Cardano in terms of transaction, a developer has dismissed claims of a 1 million TPS.

Cardano is currently building Hydra, its layer-2 solution aimed at improving the network’s performance, especially in terms of scalability. As the development of Hydra nears its final stages, claims of the L2 solution handling up to 1 million transactions per second (TPS) have emerged. However, a Cardano developer recently debunked this.

Matthias “KtorZ” Benkfort, a Cardano developer and technical director at the Cardano Foundation, dismissed these claims while responding to remarks made by Marco Meerman, a Cardano SPO operator.

Taking to Twitter, Meerman recently shared claims that Hydra will help Cardano hit a 1 million TPS, making the network the fastest blockchain in the world.

However, Benkfort immediately debunked these claims, noting that it is misleading. ‘No it is not. Please stop spreading the “1 million tps” narrative; it is misleading,‘ he stressed.

No it is not. Please stop spreading the “1 million tps” narrative 🙏, it is misleading.

If you need more information about what is Hydra and what can it do, check:

– https://t.co/D3xqC2Z6Fs
– https://t.co/1x2x1CARLK
– https://t.co/s5rSg1O9rw

— KtorZ (@_KtorZ_) May 13, 2023

While Hydra promises to assist with Cardano’s scalability, its capabilities have recently been overhyped. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, dispelled these “1 million TPS” claims in a past Twitter streaming session he held.

However, reports allege that Hoskinson could have inadvertently ignited the “1 million TPS” narrative during a streaming session. In one of his live streams in March 2020, Hoskinson is observed presenting a theoretical situation where a conjunction of 1,000 Hydra heads, each with 1,000 TPS could lead to 1 million TPS.

Hoskinson remarked: “[…] as we add more stake pools, we get more heads, and the performance will scale up. For example, if you have a thousand TPS and a thousand heads, you could be looking at a maximum theoretical performance of a million transactions per second.”

These comments from 2020 have been misconstrued to mean that Hydra will aid Cardano in handling 1 million transactions per second.

Cardano Devs Make Progress on Hydra Development

The recent effort from Benkfort to dispel the claims comes on the back of a major development relating to the development of Hydra.

As disclosed by Sebastian Nagel, one of the Cardano developers working on Hydra, the first mainnet-compatible version of the Hydra node was released last week. Recall that the team initially released Hydra heads on the public testnet last March, as previously reported by The Crypto Basic.

Hydra functions as a scalability protocol designed to enhance the transaction processing capabilities of Cardano. Much like the mythical creature, Hydra allows for creating multiple “heads” or subchains that can operate in parallel, processing transactions independently of each other. These subchains are called Hydra heads.