This was an enormous ask with so many considerations.

“Adaptive security, semi-synchrony, we wanted fast finality, we wanted the ability to bootstrap from genesis without having a checkpoint, we wanted to de-couple the clock. We wanted to be able to recover from spikes of dishonest majority and also we needed to build a delegation system, we needed to build a stake pool system and that we needed a productive way of orchestrating, curating all of that including building a brand new way of handling networking for our entire industry.”

This colossal task has consumed 5 years of research from a team of more than two dozen scientists and engineers essentially working full time.

As a result of this ask and these efforts is what is called

Ouroboros Hydra

The isomorphic state channel paper can be viewed here on eprint.

Ouroboros Hydra is a layer 2 solution that can sit gracefully on top of the Cardano protocol and accelerate it. Simulations show that each Ouroboros head can perform around 1000 transactions per second (TPS) (un-optomized). As more “heads” are added to the protocol, these heads should show a similar TPS.