Las Vegas hosted the RareEvo blockchain conference from August 15-17, attracting projects and community members from Cardano and other blockchain ecosystems. Highlights included keynotes from Charles Hoskinson, a live Hydra Doom demonstration, and an interview with presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Hydra team showcased Cardano’s layer 2 solution by running one local game of Doom with 35 transactions per second, processing over 86 million transactions by August 19. RareEvo proved to be a significant event, demonstrating Cardano's scalability and innovation potential. More insights and impressions can be found by searching #rareevo24 on X.

Doom (1993) remains a cultural icon, now demonstrated on Cardano's blockchain using Hydra heads. By leveraging Hydra's ability to handle complex operations off-chain, the game runs in real-time through smart contracts validating deterministic game states. While running Doom on a blockchain is impractical, this tech demo highlights Hydra's potential, offering open-source components and innovative approaches that could inspire new blockchain applications.

This monthly report on Cardano's Hydra and Mithril scaling projects provides an insightful overview of the latest advancements and plans. Notably, the Mithril team released a new distribution (2428.0) with critical updates, prepared for upcoming distributions supporting Cardano node 9.1.0, and showcased a transaction verification demo in the Nami wallet. Meanwhile, Hydra's roadmap saw significant progress with the completion of incremental decommits, integration of an SDK for wallet developers, and ongoing efforts towards defining Hydra Head V1. The July 2024 stakeholder meeting featured engaging presentations, including Blockfrost's Mithril certificate demo and discussions on enhancing Hydra's functionality, reflecting the community's growing interest and collaboration in Cardano's scaling solutions.

The Mithril project in June saw the release of distribution 2423.0, including critical updates like removing the deprecated snapshot command and improving transaction certification performance. Work on Cardano integration progressed, focusing on decentralizing signature diffusion. The Hydra project made significant strides with incremental decommits, updating the protocol's specification, and fixing a critical bug in the decommit feature. They also made breaking changes to the hydra-node API and enhanced the system's security and efficiency, with a planned release in the near future.

The roundtable discussion features Pi Lanningham and Arnaud Bailly exploring the intricacies of Ouroboros Leios, a blockchain-based technology aimed at enhancing decentralized systems. They delve into Leios's architecture, its potential applications in the tech industry, and the innovative solutions it offers for scalability and security. The conversation also covers the implications of Ouroboros Leios for developers and businesses, highlighting its unique approach to consensus and transaction processing. This insightful dialogue provides a comprehensive understanding of how Leios could revolutionize blockchain technology and its real-world applications.

In May, the Mithril project released distribution 2418.1, which included critical updates like changes to the certificate chain structure and memory optimizations. Significant progress was made in Cardano transaction certification, achieving a 100x improvement in throughput and reducing storage requirements. The Hydra project released version 0.17.0 with breaking changes to the /commit endpoint, new HTTP endpoints, and focused on incremental decommits. Testing and optimization efforts continued, and several Hydra-related Catalyst proposals were discussed, exploring diverse use cases and alternative scaling approaches.

The Cardano Foundation emphasizes innovation and research in blockchain technology. Their research paper, “MACS: A Multi-Asset Coin Selection Algorithm for UTxO-based Blockchains,” presented at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, highlights the benefits of the MACS algorithm. MACS optimizes transaction fees, UTxO pool size, and user privacy, improving UTxO-based blockchains. Though tested in simulations, it shows promise for enhancing cost, speed, and privacy in blockchain transactions, with further real-world testing needed.

Ouroboros Genesis, the latest enhancement to Cardano’s consensus protocol, addresses the vulnerabilities of nodes joining or rejoining the network. It introduces concepts like ledger peers, lightweight checkpointing, limits on eagerness (LoE) and patience (LoP), and Genesis density disconnections (GDD). These measures prevent long-range and eclipse attacks, ensuring nodes can securely sync with the blockchain. The first Genesis-capable implementation is expected by Q3 2024, with ongoing optimizations to handle increased peer counts.

In April, the Mithril project focused on increasing SPO participation, reaching 258 registered signers, representing 22% of Cardano’s active stake. Key updates included a pre-release of distribution 2418.1 and decentralization experiments for the signer registration process. The Hydra project updated its roadmap, emphasizing incremental commits and decommits, and introduced enhancements to the /commit endpoint. The Cardano Buidler Fest featured significant contributions, including the integration of Mithril into Cardano’s IBC protocol and Sundae Labs’ development of the Gummiworm fork for enhanced security in Hydra heads. Logo designs for both projects were also refreshed.

In March, Mithril saw an increase in SPO participation, reaching 230 pools with 4.6B₳ stake, representing 20% of the active stake. The release of Mithril distribution 2412.0 included support for Prometheus metrics, Pallas-based chain observer implementation, and the deprecation of the snapshot command. Hydra focused on incremental commits and decommits, Conway era support, and preparing for the 0.16.0 release. Significant progress was made on streaming plugins, with SundaeLabs contributing to a plugin architecture that enhances Hydra's extensibility for various external systems and scalable persistence methods.