Hydra
Hydra is Cardano’s layer 2 scalability solution, aiming to increase transaction speed through low latency and high throughput also offering minimized transaction cost.
Hydra Head is the first protocol of the Hydra family of protocols, which embodies the foundation for more advanced deployment scenarios relying on isomorphic, multi-party state channels. Each Hydra Head works as an off-chain mini ledger shared between a small group of participants. Developers can use Hydra Heads to add specialized, complex protocols on top of Cardano.
Development resources:
Further reading:
- Hydra – Cardano’s solution for ultimate layer 2 scalability blog post
- Implementing Hydra Heads: the first step towards the full Hydra vision blog post
- Hydra: Fast Isomorphic State Channels research paper
- Interhead Hydra: Two Heads are Better than One research paper