Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, has teased the imminent release of Hydra, a Layer 2 scaling solution via X. The announcement posted earlier today, August 2, reads, “Are you ready for Hydra at Rare Evo?” This tease precedes the upcoming Rare Evo blockchain and crypto conference scheduled to take place in two weeks, from August 15-17 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event annually gathers innovators and investors from across the crypto industry.

Cardano Hydra Heads Is “Coming Soon”

This year, the Rare Evo conference includes three discussions surrounding the Cardano ecosystem, notably on its final day. The day begins with Tim Harrison, VP of Community and Leadership at Input | Output, joined by Ben O’Hanlon, Head of Community, delivering a comprehensive review of Cardano’s ecosystem growth. Their talk, titled “Seeing The Whole Picture: Illuminating Cardano’s Ecosystem Growth,” is set to provide insights into the holistic development strategies employed by the Cardano developer.

Following this, Trym Måke Bruset, Hydra Project Manager at Input | Output, will present “The Making of Hydra DOOM.”. This talk is potentially particularly significant as it aligns closely with the teased release of the Hydra protocol by Hoskinson.

The series of talks concludes with a presentation from Thomas Mayfield, Team Lead for Decentralized Identity and Identity Solutions, who will discuss the future of identity solutions within blockchain in his speech titled “The Future of Identity: Presenting The Next Generation of SSI and Organizational Identity.”

Adding to the anticipation, Hoskinson linked a newly launched website in his post on X which currently displays a “coming soon” message and offers a link for visitors to “learn more about Hydra here,” redirecting them to the extensive Hydra documentation.

Are you ready for Hydra at Rare Evo?https://t.co/tJNNcFuE4d

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 2, 2024

What Is Hydra Heads?

Hydra stands as a cornerstone of Cardano’s strategy to enhance network performance. It is designed to increase transaction speed through the use of state channels, known as Hydra Heads, which facilitate off-chain transaction processing while maintaining the security measures of the main Cardano blockchain.

Notably, Hydra Heads is the “first protocol of the Hydra family and embodies the foundation for more advanced deployment scenarios relying on isomorphic, multi-party state-channels.”

The operational mechanism of Hydra involves participants initiating a Hydra Head by performing a specific on-chain transaction that locks up a certain amount of funds and sets the initial state of the Head. Participants can then execute multiple transactions among themselves off the main chain, which are nearly instantaneous and incur significantly lower fees than those processed on the blockchain.

Each Hydra Head is theoretically capable of handling around 1,000 transactions per second (TPS). Given that multiple Heads can operate simultaneously, the overall capacity of the network can scale horizontally, potentially supporting many thousands of TPS depending on the number of active Heads.

At press time, ADA traded at $0.38.