How a Doom Tournament Made Cardano the Fastest Blockchain With 1M TPS

• Solana’s max theoretical TPS is 65,000, whereas Visa processes approximately 1,700 TPS.
• Over 2000 games of Hydra Doom have been played on the Cardano blockchain.
• The ADA token is up 15% in the past 7 days and is trading at $1.19.

A Doom gaming tournament to test out Cardano’s (ADA) “Hydra Head” Layer-2 protocol has seen the network record over 1 million transactions per second (TPS), suggesting a bright future for the underdog network.

Doom on Cardano

The Cardano network just hosted a $100,000 Doom multiplayer tournament to test out the capabilities of its Hydra protocol, and it’s been a gigantic success after the network posted 1.04 million TPS at its peak.

For reference, that leaves the blockchains with the highest max theoretical TPS in the dust. Seemingly, an isolated test of Hydra is capable of outperforming the Solana network’s entire max theoretical TPS of 65,000.

Looking at Chainspect , that’s more than 100x Solana’s max recorded TPS and five times Internet Computer’s (ICP’s) 209,708 max theoretical TPS.

At present, both ICP and Solana are averaging over 1,000 TPS, which is still way under the 1,500 – 2,000 TPS that legacy finance giant Visa claims to be able to handle.

Cardano, The Fastest

In an August 2024 demonstration, a single-player version of Doom was recorded running on Hydra at a smooth 35 frames per second.

In short, Hydra is Cardano’s Layer-2 scaling solution that manages transactions off-chain, thereby improving the speed and efficiency of transactions and smart contracts.

The main component, the hydra heads, represents state channels that closely mirror on-chain environments. This gives groups of users the means to take assets off-chain and interact with unlimited transactions.

Each Head can handle  about 1,000 TPS and, according to Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson, reach a “Fast Finality,” where a transaction becomes irreversible almost instantaneously.

Users pay to set up and enter a Hydra Head and then pay to close it, which posts the results onto the main chain. Notably, transactions in the Head aren’t recorded and bear no transaction costs.

The Fastest

Perhaps downplaying Hydra’s capabilities back in 2023, a Cardano dev preferred to quash the 1 million TPS narrative as it was “misleading,” which, after a year, has aged like milk.

As it turns out, Hydra might actually be a “magic wand,” considering its incredible capabilities in delivering instant, lightspeed transactions capable of running a whole video game tournament.

It’s quite an achievement, and as the Doom Hydra tournament progresses, the 1 million TPS benchmark could easily be crossed once again.