Cardano’s co-founder, Charles Hoskinson, has dismissed rumors suggesting that the Hydra layer-2 scaling project for the network has been abandoned. On March 18, Hoskinson took to social media to confirm that developers are still actively working on the project, calling the rumors “pure FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). The Hydra protocol, launched in May 2023, aims to enhance transaction processing capacity and reduce costs on the Cardano blockchain as part of the network’s scaling roadmap known as “Basho.”
The rumors of abandonment stemmed from a video uploaded by the YouTube channel The Cryptoviser on March 17. The video claimed that Cardano had shifted its focus away from Hydra after Hoskinson announced an integration with Hyperledger Firefly, a scaling solution for building and scaling Web3 applications. In response, Hoskinson assured his followers on social media that the team is highly productive and motivated, with ongoing community engagement and new enhancements to the protocol in the works.
This is not the first time Hoskinson has had to address FUD surrounding Hydra. In October, he posted a video defending the protocol’s capabilities as a scaling solution for Cardano and emphasizing that Cardano operates as a transaction-per-transaction system rather than a transactions-per-second system. He also mentioned that Hydra had adapted to provide middleware for developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) on Cardano.
On March 18, Hoskinson once again defended Cardano against what he called a “wave of FUD” regarding its collaboration with digital ID platform World Mobile and its scaling roadmap. While Cardano has seen an increase in decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked (TVL) this year, reaching an all-time high of $520 million on March 14, it still lags behind competitors such as Ethereum, Tron, BNB Smart Chain, and Solana, which collectively have a TVL of $72 billion.
In other news, a security analyst has come forward to defend his involvement in the crypto scam franchise known as Pink Drainer.