Cardano-based Hydra L2 network set a record for throughput above 1 million transactions per second

The network counted game frames from a Doom tournament as transactions

05.12.2024 - 13:10

4 min

What’s new? The throughput of the Hydra Layer 2 (L2) network based on the Cardano blockchain has exceeded 1 million transactions per second (TPS). The figure was recorded during the Doom game tournament, which runs from December 3 to January 2025, supported by developer Cardano Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK). Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson attributed such a high result to the fact that every game frame was counted as a transaction.

Source: X.com

What else is known? According to the official data from the tournament page, the throughput at the time of writing is only 503 TPS, with the figure rising to 878 000 TPS at the peak. Nevertheless, the peak result is still much higher than that of competing Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Solana and Ethereum.

Thus, according to Chainspect, Solana’s throughput record was 7229 TPS, with a theoretical peak of 65 000 TPS. Ethereum has these figures equal to 62,34 and 119 TPS respectively. Cardano has them even lower: 11,62 and 18,02 TPS.

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The developer of Cardano-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Sundaeswap, Josh Marchand, believes that Hydra has a huge scalability potential, limited only by processor capacity, and 1 million TPS is not the limit.

Source: X.com

In turn, a crypto analyst under the nickname Goku noted that the transactions in the Doom tournament were not processed on the Cardano mainnet, but were a simulation within the testnet.

Source: X.com

Hydra, launched last year, is designed to improve Cardano’s scalability by increasing throughput while reducing latency and transaction costs.

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