Cardano has reportedly released its latest project – Ouroboros Hydra – designed to function as an off-chain scalability protocol, following half a decade of development. 

Specifically, the protocol was particularly designed to help the Cardano blockchain achieve an enhanced level of scalability and low latency, while minimizing the storage capacity taken up on the network’s nodes.

The protocol further offers support for a wide range of applications, nominally micropayments, voting, insurance contracts, and other uses that include low fees or the instant transactions feature.

As revealed by an IOHK representative – parent firm of Cardano – Hydra is a collaborative research project, financially backed by the EU and initiated half a decade ago, which is expected to provide scalability for up to a million transactions every second. 

For Hydra, a total of 10 head will be issued by whichever individual linked up with the network, which are the throughput lanes accounted for data and transactions, and ultimately helps the system accelerate and bring down its latency as it scales.

The University of Edinburgh has reportedly conducted simulation session, with reports showing that every Hydra head has the power to facilitate approximately 1,000 transactions every second, and optimization work can still be performed on this current system. 

“Essentially, the bottleneck becomes the network connection between the participants, not the protocol.” The report further read