Hydro Labs, a decentralized, and open-source project for blockchain applications, today announced a new partnership with plasma infrastructure provider OmiseGO. The partnership will ensure that Hydro Pay transactions are no longer bottlenecked by Ethereum scalability issues.
Users of Hydro’s peer-to-peer (P2P) payments app will be able to make instant transactions even when the Ethereum network is congested. For OmiseGo, the partnership brings about real-world usage of its plasma chain technology for day-to-day payments.
Scaling Issue
Scalability has been a long-standing problem for Ethereum as most famously shown during the Crypto Kitties craze of 2017, and more recently by the launch of USDT on the Ethereum blockchain. Quite simply, the current Ethereum blockchain cannot handle any large number of transactions without significant waiting time and cost implications.
It has been suggested, but not proven, that alternative (newer) chains may be the answer outside of Ethereum, however, this comes at a cost, security. Simply put, the more decentralized a chain is, the more secure it is. With Ethereum’s very large hashrate and robust network of nodes (100% uptime), it doesn’t get much more decentralized than that. No other chain can offer both the features, and level of security.
Work is currently underway on fixing Ethereum’s scaling issues with Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity); however, until such time as this is complete, the community is stuck with Ethereum’s current transaction speed. OmiseGo’s plasma chain will allow Hydro Pay to overcome these issues for users of the app.
Hydro Pay / OmiseGo
The Hydro Pay (beta) app was released at the end of July 2019, and by using meta-transactions (MetaTX), this meant Hydro Pay was the first product functioning on Ethereum to allow users to make gas-less transactions. However, the Hydro Labs team soon realized that scaling was an issue, first for creating an account, and secondly for making a transfer. Neither was instant, which is an issue for any type of payment application. To solve these issues, the Hydro Labs team decided to use a plasma side-chain and that’s where the OmiseGO partnership comes into place.
With OmiseGo’s child chain solution, Hydro Pay will be able to scale up to an impressive 3,000+ tps (up from just 15tps on Ethereum currently). Moreover, this rate of transactions will only increase. First, as OMG continues to fine-tune its technology, and secondly, once Ethereum 2.0 is released.
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