Hydra Head - Proof of Concept (POC)

A home to our colorful experiments and prototypes.

🌄 Introduction

Hydra is the layer-two scalability solution for Cardano, which aims to increase the speed of transactions (low latency, high throughput) and minimize transaction cost.

This repository contains the proof-of-concept implementation for the Hydra Head protocol. It is a developer preview that we've put together, marching towards a production ready solution. It outlines the basic architecture of a hydra-node, which runs a simplified (coordinated) Hydra Head protocol, connects to other hydra-nodes, interfaces the Cardano blockchain and provides an API to clients such as the included terminal user interface hydra-tui.

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️

This is still prototypical and exploratory work shared here for your interest.

It is NOT ready for production (yet).

🚀 Getting started

The quickest way to get a hydra-node running is to use our docker images.

docker pull ghcr.io/input-output-hk/hydra-node:latest
docker run --rm ghcr.io/input-output-hk/hydra-node --help

More information (including a demo) available on user manual 📖!

🌈 Features

Proof of concept:

• Coordinated Hydra Head protocol
• Single Head per hydra-node
• Network statically configured, direct TCP connections
• WebSocket, message-based API Server
• Terminal user interface client
• Cardano-node integration via Direct connection
• Running on testnet

Later:

• Persisted Head state
• Audited and mainnet ready
• Multiple Heads per hydra-node, managed via API
• Support for external wallets (e.g. hardware wallets)
• Optimistic Head closure and incremental de-/commit protocol extension
• Relay-capable, mesh network

🤝 Contributing

The best way to contribute right now is to provide feedback. Give the demo a test drive and have a look at our documentation. Should you have any questions, ideas or issues, we would like to hear from you:

• #ask-hydra on the IOG Discord server
• create a Github Discussion or Issue
• or ask on Cardano StackExchange using the hydra tag

When contributing to this project and interacting with other contributors, please follow our Code of Conduct.

---

Thanks for visiting and enjoy ❤️!