...that'll surface from time to time where, you know, I had a different vision, or you know, wanted to go in a particular way. Um, you see Vitalic recently talking about the merits of extended UTxO and uh, plasma. Kind of sounds a bit like Hydra, doesn't it? Um, that's something that I don't really know. What are Steve's end goals or aims? Obviously, he's got an agenda and he's going to pursue it.

...you look at Cardano as a whole. Input endorsers on the horizon will make Cardano one of the fastest blockchains ever conceived. That will just happen. It will take a while, but it will happen. Hydra is the best thought about how to really do that layer two stuff. Meanwhile, you have Mithril already in its second generation with ALBA, and it will get integrated into the core node at some point. We've got a great...

Then of course, there's the third thread that never stops. There are multiple threads; it's like we're weavers here. That third thread that never stops is improvements to Plutus and the development experience. We're starting to fall in love with Aiken a little bit. The Hydra team actually prototyped some of the Hydra stuff with Aiken and did a cross-comparison to Plutus script, and there's...

It's nice because it allowed us to have great conversations about CIP30 CIP95. We had great conversations about how one would build a Dap store, and we had some phenomenal ideas there that will work their way through. However, it makes us care a lot more because we're on the receiving end of the technology. Just like Hydra makes us care a lot about the DAP side of things because we have to...

...use the tools we've built to implement Hydra. If they don't work as well as we'd hoped, then we're like, "Ah, we need to make some improvements there." So, overall, I kind of enjoy the pace of that. I'm an aggressive guy, so I'll push harder to speed it up a bit, but I do want Lace to be the standard for the industry, not just for Cardano, but for the industry as a well-built wallet experience.

Let the blockchain be the broker for people to discover, and then let people vote in their local clusters, and distribute accordingly, or run competing programs, for example. Then there's a democratic consent behind people's status. A lot of people are talking about how Hydra is flawed. You know, Hydra is not flawed, guys. When you have a product that is on very strong footing, you have a ton...

...and if you look at Cardano, that's where we're at. We have Hydra as one set of tools. The side chain strategy is another set of tools. The evolution of extended UTXL and Pluto is another set of tools. A lot of off-chain stuff is another set of tools. Okay, well, any one of those things potentially could solve your problem. When I look at the evolution of those things, I say, okay, am I...

We can have better predictions about your sets of tools. That's what was done with Mythril and Hydra, where it went from nothing to where we're at with such a large group of people and doing interesting things. Now, is it perfect? No. Does it solve everybody's problems? Oh Lord, no. But will it get to a point in the evolutionary horizon where it does solve a lot of problems for a lot of people?

Here's what happened. People took Hydra outside of IO as a marketing thing. They made YouTube videos and said, "Hydra is the secret weapon that's going to kill Ethereum and all these other guys. Hydra is going to do this thing - a million transactions per second." This was because I read in a blog post that that's its theoretical maximum or something like that.

Of external meetings with foreign regulators, talking to them about how they should regulate cryptocurrencies, a lot of DC stuff is still floating around. There's a lot of engagement at the state level with various actors. We've been floating through, plus maintaining all of the open source programs and projects that we have like Hydra and MytMithril, as well as the publication.

...threads which are nice to have some of them are coming true like mithil and Hydra for example and Marlow which people are already starting to use and a lot of great Community projects like TX pipe for example you know blockfrost for example these types of things they're doing great work there's a vibrant wallet ecosystem I think there's 14 15 wallets in the cardano...

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is October 5th, 2023, and I wanted to make a video to talk a little bit about Hydra, prior comments, and some unpleasant commentary that people have been sharing. There are a few people over the internet who are claiming that there's a great degree of dishonesty from myself, in particular.

Uh, but others in our organization have concerns about the throughput of Hydra and prior historical statements. So, facts are tricky things and I know people on the internet don't like them, but let's go ahead and look at some source material and discuss Hydra as a project and its future trajectory. So, I'm going to share my screen here. Alright, first things first, here is a blog post by Aggelos Kiayias wrote back in 2020 talking about the Hydra experimental validation of the Hydra head protocol.

Experimentally validating the performance of the Hydra head protocol - As a first step towards experimentally validating the performance of the Hydra head protocol, we implemented a simulation. The simulation is parameterized by the time required by individual actions (validating transactions, verifying signatures, etc.), and carries out a realistic and timing-correct simulation of a cluster of distributed nodes forming a head. This results in realistic transaction confirmation time and throughput calculations.

We see that a single Hydra head achieves up to roughly 1,000 TPS, so by running 1,000 heads in parallel (for example, one for each stake pool of the Shelley release), we should achieve a million TPS. So, this is basically, well, this is hypothetical.

Throughput, uh, with these channels, now, three years have passed. We've all learned lots of things, and you have the Hydra website you can go to right here. And, actually, here's the live roadmap of Hydra head, where we're actually implementing in a completely open source and public way on Mainnet, not a testnet. Hydra, and there's a large ecosystem that's starting to form around Hydra.

...Hydra pivoted a little bit and it pivoted into let's build some middleware that it's going to be really easy for you as a developer to plug into your application work with Plutus to help get a lot of that complex logic that you should not run on the main network but run it on a different network like the batching, the voting, and the event-oriented programming, the event-based programming where events happen and you have to be around 24/7 to pick them up and do something. Multisig, all kinds of stuff that you'd like to run in some sort of other network and you could build stuff on top so what's happened is an open-source ecosystem is forming around that concept and what they're doing is they're building applications and...

Driving the roadmap of Hydra. Hydra is evolving, and it is being done in public. Everybody can see it. It's running on the mainnet right now. In the coming year, those types of applications will ferment and become very, very standard. Now, what this does is it lowers the overall load of things that are happening on the Cardano main network, which is the intent. Now, at any given time, you can push the protocol...

Ouroboros Leios, which is the input endorsers workstream, will allow mass parallelization and high-speed layer one. But we are also looking at rollups as an ecosystem, side chains as an ecosystem, and yes, evolutions of Hydra. I made a 45-minute scalability video about these things. But what people do is they take a single quote, a single paragraph, a single notion that was there to elucidate...

...on adoption: It has a real impact on people's opinion of the system overall. Every time a lie is told, it takes ten times as much effort to undo that in people's memory. So, when people go around saying Hydra has failed, we lied about Hydra, there's no way to achieve any of these performance claims that are made. Well, then what they're really doing is taking...

...the hard work of dozens of people, and everybody building on it. They're saying it just doesn't exist. It is not currently an emphasis of the Hydra protocol to try to maximize throughput. It doesn't make any sense in this network. We're not even using all of the layer one throughput at the moment. It's much more about enabling the applications that people want to have and giving them...

System like that can get you don't change the underlying core of extended UTXO, and yes Hydra is another case study in this. Over time, as the years go by, it gets more sophisticated. A tail protocol is added in, provisions for high throughput are added in, and finally, when applications require that interhead communication, there are plenty of great protocols for that. It just becomes a...

...and if the people have been around for nearly a decade now, working hard every single day, don't get any benefit of the doubt year after year after year, then what chance does a normal person have who's just fair weather? You get what you want, how you act. You know, and we're just going to keep chipping away at it. Hydra is not going anywhere; it just keeps getting...

Of so many engineers, some are still here, some are now somewhere else. We owe it to all of them and all the time that they put in to make sure that the work is referred to fairly and accurately. Just that simple. So now, you have a video. Anytime you see anything about Hydra and these people, just post this one, and we'll keep chipping away at it. I'll see everybody at the Cardano Summit. Cheers.

What technology will allow us to have fast transactions? The transaction is done within a few seconds instead of having to wait 20 seconds like the current block. That's called Fast finality, and there are two routes to achieve it. One is Hydra, and the other route is through a finality Gadget. So currently, our thinking is to solve finality gadgets at three different levels.

And obviously, we'll have a lot of people from the Voltaire team there to talk about governance. Sam Leathers is going to be there, and Sam is going to do a master class workshop on Sanchonet, which is 1694's testnet. The Hydra team is actually in the office today preparing for RareEvo to talk about a Hydra Master Class where they're going to show you guys how to use Hydra, Mithril, and other technologies together.

So, here's what we've been doing today for Cardano. There's really four major items: Hydra, Mithril++, we get sidechains one of these days, we should probably use a bigger, better term for that, so Hydra, Mithril, sidechains, and optimizations.

Okay, so Hydra is middleware. It's on mainnet, and it's growing very rapidly. So, the release cycle is not like, oh, this big thing, it requires a hard fork. No, it's a straight-up smart contract, and the idea is that a dApp takes Hydra, and then it starts putting some stuff off-chain.

In fact, if you guys want to participate, I'd recommend you go to hydra.family. This is the website for it, and you can see there's just an enormous amount of stuff going on. And if you go to the Discord, a lot of, let's see, how many users are there, actually 1600, 12000 members that are online right now.

And there's a big chunk for the Hydra community, and then you go over to GitHub, and you actually take a look at the project, you can actually see here the roadmap. Things are moving really quickly, and this all the stuff that's already been released, and these are all the cards for various things.

Okay, so this also includes a concept of roll-ups. And we've just released the first version of Mithril, and what's going to happen is Mithril is going to follow a very similar evolution to Hydra. But there is some science here, so there's kind of a question of Mithril 2.0 and how should we go about building good data availability layer for the system. Well, there's a great video that's from DC Spark and it says data availability Solutions overview Chia, Polygon, Algorand, Celestia, IPFS, and Ethereum.

Also, a lot of traffic gets driven to the sidechain which means there's less load on the mainchain. So, there's some things that you do to get stuff off the chain. So, Hydra for example gets stuff off the chain, roll-ups get stuff off the chain, side chains get stuff off the chain.

Babel fees also will require a fork and fee markets will require Fork so there are some things here for the 2024 and Beyond agenda but this is a very easy to conceive of system. Hydra will continue its rampant Evolution and for the most part will work its way into a lot of dapps that require scale and consistency.

The job here is to get the proof of concept finished and have a very clear view, continue the research to basically get those designs in place, and then kind of let the community decide. When you look over here, there really isn't a movement in the trade-off profile. The existence of Hydra doesn't change what people signed up for with Genesis.

That is a parallel work stream to this work stream for Basho. This one right here is already underway, and you guys are seeing it. Hydra is on mainnet, Mithril just got on mainnet, sidechains are very mature, and lots to say in just a little bit about it.

There has been eight years of research. Probably about 30 of the 180 papers in the portfolio that we have is strictly about the Basho era. There's been enormous wins. Hydra didn't exist as code three years ago. Now it's on mainnet. People are using it. An open-source ecosystem is growing around it and it evolves every week.

It builds on how we've handled a universal backlog and it can learn from things like how Hydra has been a very successful open-source program and then we get to do some cool new things like blockchain-based certificates to get credentials so you actually can drive some of the change of Cardano onto the blockchain itself.

That's the point of good governance, that you can get things done but you get wise good things done on a regular basis. What's also super cool about this structure is that this structure can act as a primary secondary concern. What I mean by that is that you have Cardano as your top-level project but then you have these other projects like Hydra for example, Open Prism, Plutus as the language because that's different, Marlowe.

...from the IO GitHub repos to the Intersect repos and how we intend on an open-source project kind of growing and really becoming the thing that we've all wanted to love and treasure. You know the code is open source. We certainly have a lot of contributors across the space that work on it, but we could do better if we look at Hydra, for example, there's over 40 people show up regularly for the meetings that are happen. There's already parallel projects like Hydrozoa from MLabs.

..and a lot of third party contribution for the HYDRA code base and a nice open cadence as well as everything living in git. So that's what we should aspire for, and it's going to be a lot of fun to move things over. A huge amount of progress as well on CIP1694, we had the workshop in Edinburgh. It was very successful as a closing workshop to finalize a candidate spec and now Sanchonet is underway. That is a very specialized test net specifically to give Bleeding Edge features.

Hi Charles, how's the update with Hydra? Great to see aging. Guys, Open source software is like this. Let me show you a little something. I'm gonna. I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you guys some right here.

This is the Hydra, website hydra.family And it has a user manual use cases, core concepts, topologies, benchmarks, API reference. OK, if you click on GitHub. All right, so if you go ahead and take a look at the project. Here's the road map. This is all publicly available. You guys can all see you asked me in the AMA, but really with an open source project you just have to see things and if we take a look at our releases, uh, let's see here code and we go over here you can see 7304 commits.

You can see all the features, event source, persistence, authenticate network messages. Ability to read protocol parameters by APIs. Submit layer one transactions through Hydra node, remove commit. These are all features anticipated for 0.12.

Where do they come from? They came. From the open Source project all the. People using Hydra, all the people building on hydro, all the people excited about hydro. That's where they came from and they're right here right 1/2. And to less than .1, they're all features that they want to do beyond the point 1-2. Really. So, the team of people from the community work every day and these cards are well defined features in a backlog.

The intent of Hydra is that it works its way into as many gaps in the Cardano ecosystem as possible. And that software as it evolves, makes using Cardano better, faster, cheaper and gives properties like instant finality and other things. Now those capabilities are not ten years out. They literally are evolving week by week, by week by week and do not require a hard fork of Cardano to work.

So, Hydra is an indispensable long arc thing. That every week, every month, every year, you come and look at it. It goes from wow we're playing around with it to its running on mainnet to it is in many of the applications in Cardano. Now you sell those things like a million TPS. It's very unfortunate people even thought this way because at the end of the day, what they're really talking about is you're alleviating the need for TPS.

Because you're creating something in your application with other components where a lot of your logic is now running a lot of your expensive stuff is not running and the end result of that concept is what? It is better, faster, cheaper, less TPS on the main chain or TPS over here, lower latency. Free transactions, instant finality, all kinds of capabilities. That's the point of Hydra, and there's isomorphism.

It's a lot of work and to bring all these different people and they have working groups for different concepts like the core node, scalability, things like smart contracts, identity etcetera, etcetera. Lot an enormous lift. So much work has to be done. But as it moves in that direction, you can see a single concise website. And you're moving from left to right. Right. And the community is deciding the cards just like with HYDRA that go in there and every day you come back and week by week, by week, things get better, faster, cheaper.

The very next thing after that is input endorsers. Is it necessary when you got Hydra and Mithril and you got rollups on the way, and you got sidechains. It will be and it will be in a horizon about three years to five years. That's when it's necessary.

And you got that. That's what you have. That's Cardano. When you're a Cardano user, that's what you have, alongside Hydra, alongside Marlowe, alongside all these other things, plus the best community, the cryptocurrency space. I don't know guys, you know.

And bolt load of stuff to do download sanchonet we'll have a website for it, just like we have for Hydro dot family and obviously all lives in GitHub, just like Hydra does. Can't wait to see what you guys construct and a lot of really exciting things to come. It took a very long time to build all these pieces and all these pieces are now coming together.

Hydra is still moving at an extraordinary pace, the development of Cardano node. Now that we're on the 8.x is moving very quickly. Lace has a monthly release cycle and we've already gotten to version 1.31. 1.4 on the horizon here, just a a little bit.

...backlog actually turns into a full open-source program and we've learned a lot about how to do this in practice from projects like HYDRA, for example, which have a very high level of community participation and a pretty agile high-volume process.

There's now so many different ways to participate from the CIP editor process to Sancho net to building governance software, to participating as a dRep, to joining intersect, to building new software in the ecosystem, to contributing to an open-source project. TXPIPE or HYDRA in the ecosystem, being core developer.

The reality is that we're all working together and we're getting a lot of progress. You know, Cardano is really maturing. Cardano node 8.11 is incredible. Plutus is really shaping up, especially with BLS support on Plutus. Lot of wonderful things happening on the sidechain side, lot of really wonderful things happening with HYDRA.

Come on. Let's be good. Let's be positive. Let's look to the bright side of things and the industry as a whole, our best days are ahead of us. We got Hydra, we got rollups, we got great sidechains. We, you know, we got amazing things coming in Africa. We didn't give up on anything.

There's also an enormous amount of effort with Mythril and HYDRA at the moment. Hydra team continues to deliver very rapidly and there seems to be some misunderstanding over Twitter and other places where people say when HYDRA, when it's Hydra coming, Hydra is running, it actually does work on the mainnet and there's a very vibrant community of developers that are using it as middleware and exploring and experimenting with it. From Obsidian to MLabs to others who are actually intending to take Hydra to the next level, so the core team is speed. And Hydra technology continues to improve.

It's not like a light switch where something gets delivered and then magically everything is insane and great. It's a spectrum, and the point of HYDRA is to be software to integrate into people's dapps, to reduce the on chain blow, and on chain operational cost and improve the speed and finality of things.

Now there's flavors of Hydra, like the tail protocol and head-to-head protocols, and these types of things. And those are road map items with this rapidly advancing team. And what's wonderful is Hydra is probably the best open-source program that we have in the Cardano ecosystem at the moment, given the level of collaboration the meetings regularly have more than 40 people in them from many different organizations, and actually the Cardano Foundation is even Co developing HYDRA and they have developed dedicated developers on it along with Obsidian and IO and other people.

So it's a very decentralized program already and it's gotten a lot of community adoption. So we're we're really proud of that team and what we're trying to do is just make sure that it continues to improve in velocity and gain more resources and throughout the year, it's going to just keep being built up and it'll get more and more capabilities if you go to hydra.family you can actually see the website for it and if you go to the GitHub you can see the entire road map and what's planned in each of the releases.

And the advantage is here they're kind of pre-set up to start adopting technologies as they become available like Hydra for example. So it's exciting to see those types of things and it's exciting to to see things work their way through.

And when you take a look at the technology, as we move towards the members-based organization, the repos will move over and it'll be a complete end to end contribution, open source contribution guidelines very similar to how HYDRA is materializing as a program and project.

This is how I'd like to spend my time. Now there will always be a need for infrastructure and because of the way I've structured IOG, we could have a subsidiary that worries about infrastructure and wakes up every day about increasing throughput, making Hydra better and Mithril better and making sure to implement all the white papers that the scientists have written.

...Plutus, like Plutus V3, Plutus V4, and all the advancements that they're doing there, as well as natural iterations of Ouroboros, like after Genesis is out. I'd really like to see Praos and Chronos next year, so you have fast finality gadgets and proper timekeeping. I also really like how Hydra is evolving and I just love the complementarity...

...let you down. We had the big announcement about Hydra and we were like, "Here's Hydra. Every time you click a pixel, it's a transaction. Look how cool that is." It was at exactly 26 minutes. We had a full penis drawn up. God damn it. Come on, guys. It's been 18 months on this. How has that not turned into a law? That feels like a Moore's Law type of thing, like a Godwin's Law. Give the internet the...

...the ability to draw something right gives the internet the ability to draw something. It will converge to full penis, but in less than 30 minutes. Um, but, you know, that is what it is. Um, but on the other hand, it was just great to see the level of participation there. And, you know, at the last Hydra meeting I attended, like 40-45 people showed up for it. And it was real nice to see how that, uh, resulted.

...process for adding these capabilities to the system and hopefully, also give some understanding as we go into July about what a tendering process would look like for community tooling for CIP1694 and how big of a delta that's going to be. So, a lot of progress there, a lot of great progress with Mithril and Hydra. So, part of the Lace initiative is and the...

...the construction of Mithril certificates, you're going to have a situation where stateful operators create intermediate certificate advocates and exchange them amongst each other using the protocol. Then they eventually assemble the final product and commit that. There's a lot of batching that also happens in Hydra. This is a reused pattern again and again, and it would be nice to have a...

...The Pi cycle, it's really exciting to see how that's been growing. So, we're just firing on all cylinders there. There has never been this volume of work progress, and just diversity of progress, in our ecosystem. Literally, there are major innovations and side chains, governance, consumer software, identity software, off-chain frameworks like Hydra for systems like Mithril, and language design like Plutus...

...statement discusses the historical evolution of the project. It is absolutely true that the original code base with Byron had to be rewritten, a process we called the Byron reboot. The original team that handled that task is no longer here, and that code is no longer present. However, the consequences of that rewrite set the project back by about 15 months. This delay was for implementing the extended UTXO or Ouroboros, Hydra, Mithril...

Uh, there are already some amazing projects that you can see every day. They are growing rapidly and doing some incredible things. Furthermore, some of the technology of Cardano is really starting to reach maturity. It is innovating beyond any of the wildest dreams of its authors. Recently, there was good news about Hydra, with preliminary applications reaching...

For quite some time, whether it be DP sync or the node node interface or perhaps accelerating certain things like tiered pricing, for example we've basically just been triaging and going down. So we're really excited to see this new approach and we're pretty happy about it. A lot of otherwise cool, interesting things; Hydra finally reached mainnet and people have been playing around with it.

We launched Hydra on the mainnet. The first thing you guys drew with Hydra on the mainnet was a penis. Thank you very much. That was exciting. Nothing like 15 months of hardcore engineering work to get a penis drawn pixel by pixel. By the way, every pixel was a transaction, so that is a high transaction penis. Yeah, we learned a lot about that. Now, as you know, AMAs aren't just about Cardano.

Uh, so yeah, I think it's just a great model and it's built, handling a love for Hydra. It's built, hand and glove, for side chain transactions, Roll-Ups, off chain stuff, and it's very clear how you optimize the UTXO model over time. Ergo's done some great work and we continue to do great work. With every version of Plutus and update UTXO, it'll get more efficient so you can horizontally scale.

Hydra style thing is being done, and then you can have completely different models which is what side chains are about. Those three things, the horizontal, the vertical off chain, and side chains, are what really make the secret sauce great. It's just inevitable that over time, you'll get more and more speed, more and more capabilities. We've already gone

The question is, how much will Hydra improve TPS? That's really not the right question. The right question is, how do you use Hydra's middleware in your application so that you can do a lot of your expensive stuff off-chain and then, when it comes back to chain, you use fewer resources on-chain? So, there are two directions you can go. You can either do it all on-chain, which makes it very bloated.

Chain and a lot of computing power or you can try to find a way to do a lot off chain in an intelligent system and then batch it and bring it on chain. That is where everybody's kind of going, and that's what Hydra is doing. It's middleware to provide that capability. I think, yes, he describes it as a State channel. Now, it's a middleware and then, he also described it as a Dab. I

The mechanistic way, a mathematical way, is called parallel chains and parallel chances. It was written by Mathias Fitzy, Peter Gauzy, and other scientists. This is the very first step in the Ouroboros Hydra research agenda. Basically, we know all the common charting techniques. These parlances have existed for a long time, and we know how to run chains in parallel. You know, that's not rocket science.

And so forth, there are details that have to be worked out. That is why we also have this aggressive side-chains agenda. We are pushing really hard to get parallel chains and side chains to eventually converge together and become Ouroboros Hydra, which will be kind of the capstone protocol. Now, the idea there is this concept: as you add more staking pools, more delegates, more people doing...

...trade-offs and some tuning are necessary to start with Shelley in the 50 to 250 is our range there. Hydra, Our targets are five to ten thousand. We'd like to be in that range. Now, where does that get us if we just achieve that alone? Well, it provides more visa scale. Realistically, that's a network that can process a humongous load and most people would be pretty happy with it. However, we're not quite done because there's a lot of...

Their lab performance was one hundred and sixty-three thousand TPS on a production system using SGX. Great work, it's easy for us to bring that in when the time comes and layer it with other solutions like adding Oracle's, and so forth. So, the agenda for getting great performance is really three-pronged: one is to get Shelley out and then evolve Shelley to Hydra, which is really an

We have a paper coming out soon called parallel chains that with the sidechains research, it will converge to Ouroboros Hydra.

Doctor Fong recommended intermittent fasting, so I decided to bring that into my lifestyle about six months ago. I went from my peak, 242 pounds to about 220 pounds and so I've lost 22 pounds since I've done that, and I feel a lot better. The only meaningful change has been going from eating whenever to eating within an 8 hour window every day so I don't eat for 16 hours and then I eat for between usually 12-8pm. I've been trying to get to a ketogenic diet so that's a diet mostly based on fat and protein and not much carbohydrate.

We're going to go ahead and work on Ouroboros Hydra.

Then it's actually advantageous to have a lot of stake pools because instead of having 100 people do the same thing, you're having 100 people do different things. So, it's probably a good idea to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people involved in the validation and consensus process, because then it means you're getting amplification. As you add new nodes, not replication, that's called Ouroboros Hydra and it's a research effort that we're right now looking aggressively into from principles and as we enter 2019 and 2020...

His name is ????? who's from Switzerland and he worked at ETH Zurich, and we brought him on board specifically to work on this type of project. And overtime you'll see some papers being published. If you're more curious about trade off profiles, there's a great paper called Omni Ledger OMNILEDGER, which is written out of Community College and Ecole Polytechnic, CERN. And this is a starting point, and we'll do the exact same thing with Ouroboros Hydra.