Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson has dismissed rumors suggesting that the network’s Hydra layer-2 scaling project had been abandoned, labeling such claims as “pure FUD.”
In a post on X on March 18, Hoskinson clarified that developers had not given up on the Hydra project, addressing speculations that had surfaced recently.
“I’m seeing some videos claiming that Hydra has been abandoned,” he stated, before asserting, “It is just pure FUD.”
The Cardano-based protocol Hydra was introduced in May 2023 with the aim of enhancing transaction processing capacity and reducing costs on the Cardano blockchain. It forms a crucial part of Cardano’s roadmap under the “Basho” phase, which focuses on scaling.
However, a YouTube channel called The Cryptoviser uploaded a video on March 17, suggesting that Cardano had shifted away from Hydra. This conclusion was based on Hoskinson’s announcement of an integration with Hyperledger Firefly, a scaling solution for developing and scaling Web3 applications, made on March 13.
Hoskinson addressed these rumors to his 980,000 followers on X, emphasizing that the team behind Hydra was highly productive and motivated. He assured the community that new papers were in the works to enhance the protocol.
This isn’t the first time Hoskinson has had to combat FUD surrounding Hydra. In October, he defended the project against criticism regarding network scaling and throughput. Hoskinson clarified that while Hydra had “pivoted a little,” it was still focused on providing middleware for developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) on Cardano.
On March 18, Hoskinson once again pushed back against what he described as a “wave of FUD” regarding Cardano’s collaboration with digital ID platform World Mobile and its scaling roadmap.
Meanwhile, Cardano has witnessed gains in decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked (TVL) this year, reaching an all-time high of $520 million on March 14, according to DefiLlama. However, it lags behind competitors like Ethereum, Tron, BNB Smart Chain, and Solana, which collectively boast a TVL of $72 billion.
