How Cardano achieves high scalability

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1

Hi,

I’ve recently started to read about Cardano after realizing what the current Bitcoin scalability really is. ~3TPS => 220 million transactions per year => every US citizen couldn’t make a single transaction in a year.

I know about second layer solutions (Lighning Network and Hydra), but they still require to have the enter/exit transactions on chain.

However, I’ve read that Cardano supports 1000 TPS on-chain, which I think is more than enough for a savings account. Small payments could be done with Hydra.

I’m really curious to know how Cardano achieves such a high TPS limit on-chain and how is possible to make it that much better than other cryptos (I’m looking to Ethereum too).

I understand that this could be a “newbie” question, but I’d appreciate every explanation or link you could provide, I’m not a crypto expert, but I’m a software engineer eager to know more.

Thank you!

2

Hi Alex,

This is a valid question. Although I must say the 1K tps per hydra head (read per stake pool) is a second layer solution in Cardano. With 1000 pools that gives us 1M TPS. Hydra is based on a well-researched, peer-reviewed paper with the same name.

Cardano is just ramping up work on scalability and expected to launch hydra testnet this year with version 1 coming in 2022 most likely.

The main difference between the solutions that are developed by Cardano and those by Ethereum is that Cardano employs professional cryptographers to actually create these protocols and undergoes a rigorous review. I am not sure what Ethereum does… or whether they are qualified to produce such protocols.

If you are interested in the base layer transaction capacity of Cardano, this video might be helpful:

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