Hydra Head - Proof of Concept (POC)

A home to our colorful experiments and prototypes.

:sunrise_over_mountains: 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.

:warning: :warning: :warning:

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

It is NOT ready for production (yet).

:rocket: 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 📖!

:rainbow: Features

Proof of concept:

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

:handshake: 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 others, please follow our Contributing Guidelines and Code of Conduct.

Thanks for visiting and enjoy :heart:!