Hydra Head, a new tool on Cardano’s network to make transactions even faster, is live on the cryptocurrency’s main network. The idea of Hydra Head is that it is a kind of “mini database” next to the main blockchain, on which a small group of participants can communicate with each other. This ensures lightning-fast transactions between these groups and, of course, lower transaction costs.
For the gourmets
These are updates that are really for the “connoisseurs” in the crypto landscape. Most people won’t bother with an upgrade like Hydra Heads. The majority of people simply buy Cardano because they believe in it for the long term – for whatever reason – and do not use the blockchain further.
For example, developers can use Hydra Heads to create specialized and more complex decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols on Cardano, according to the technical documentation of the new tool for the network.
So we may be able to expect some cool new applications for Cardano in the coming months. Furthermore, the project also seems to be increasingly focusing on the DeFi world, where many also believe the future of the industry lies.
In January, Cardano also launched DeFi-like applications with its stablecoin djed. After all, stablecoins are an essential part for the DeFi ecosystem to function.
How’s the course?
As far as the price is concerned, it has been a tough week for Cardano – just like for the rest of the market. Cardano lost about 7.38 percent of its price value in the last seven days. Incidentally, it performs better than Bitcoin, which lost almost 10 percent of its value in the last week.
However, it is not entirely fair to compare Cardano and Bitcoin. In the first place because they both pursue completely different goals; Bitcoin is money and Cardano is a smart contract platform.
But secondly also because Bitcoin is many times bigger than Cardano. While Cardano has a market cap of $12.57 billion, Bitcoin has a market cap of $510 billion. In other words, Cardano fits into Bitcoin about 40 times by market cap.
