2024-06-04
Charles Hotkinson posted on X that , Cardano’s
treasury has sufficient funds to finance an aggressive scalability program with
Leios, Hydra, and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) to enhance Cardano blockchain.
1.
Ouroboros Leios
Ouroboros is like the engine of
Cardano, using proof of stake (PoS) to ensure decentralization without the
energy drain of Bitcoin.
However, it had a bottleneck as it
could only handle a limited number of transactions at once. The recent research
aims to fix this bottleneck by introducing several key improvements:
-Batched transactions: Instead of
adding each transaction directly to the main chain, batches of transactions are
released into the network first. This frees up space for more transactions.
-Mithril certificates: These ensure
that transactions are legitimate before they’re added to the main chain.
Batched transactions and Mithril make
Cardano become faster and more efficient while maintaining decentralization.
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s
co-founder, called Ouroboros Leios the “biggest step forward towards solving
the blockchain trilemma ever”.
This upgrade pushes the limits of
scalability and transactional speed not only for Cardano but also for the
entire ecosystem of UTXO blockchains.
2. Cardano’s Hydra
Inspired by Ancient Greece’s
multi-headed serpent, Hydra is a Layer-2 scaling solution designed to boost the
capabilities of the Cardano ecosystem.
As a layer-2, Hydra helps the Cardano
blockchain process more transactions faster. Cardano’s Hydra protocol operates independently
as isomorphic state channels alongside the Cardano mainnet.
Isomorphic means that the off-chain
protocol mirrors the on-chain one.
In theory, Hydra brings unprecedented
throughput and network speeds.
Hydra aims to make Cardano network
achieve 1 million transactions per second through the creation of Hydra heads. It
aims to address the seemingly endless issues of latency and low throughput.
3. Cardano’s Zero-Knowledge (ZK)
programs
Charles Hoskinson is developing ZK-rollup
on Cardano such as Cardano Midnight and Cardano Orbis.
Midnight is a privacy-focused sidechain
solution for Cardano,
It is powered by zero-knowledge proofs
(ZKPs), a cryptographic technique that allows one party to prove the truth of a
statement without revealing any additional information beyond the validity of
the statement itself.
Midnight operates as a separate
blockchain connected to the main Cardano network, with its own rules and
protocols.
Orbis (zk-rollups) is an early-stage Cardano scaling
solution that leverages zk-rollups.
Transactions on Orbis take place
off-chain and are then broadcast to Cardano’s mainnet through a
resource-efficient mechanism.
The team behind Orbis is requesting $1
million in funding to develop and launch it on Cardano.
Orbis will utilize zkSNARKs, a type of
zero-knowledge proof that doesn’t require two-way interaction between on-chain
and off-chain modules.
Charles Hoskinson wants to enhance Cardano’s
transaction processing capacity and he wants to make Cardano blockchain more efficient and
competitive.
