From 1993 to Blockchain: Doom Finds New Life on Cardano’s Hydra

Cardano’s layer-2 scaling solution, Hydra, is making a splash in the blockchain world with its innovative features, and the recent implementation of the classic game Doom is a prime example.

Romain Pellerin, the Chief Technology Officer of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), took to X to highlight Hydra’s advantages, especially its superiority over ZK rollups. He credits this efficiency to Hydra’s use of the Extended Unspent Transaction Output (EUTXO) model.

Pellerin’s X post emphasizes that Hydra does not require “ZK proofs to settle on Cardano.” He praised Cardano’s EUTXO model for creating a secure and versatile environment that can handle multiple operations without failing. This translates to better scalability, privacy, and simplified transaction logic. Pellerin also believes Hydra is the perfect fit for session-based decentralized applications (dApps) like multiplayer games, group chats, or high-speed payment channels between platforms.

Notably, the first Hydra head went live on the mainnet in May 2023. At the time, Input Output, the engineering company behind Cardano, took to X to share insights on the Hydra project. As per the tweet,

The first Hydra head went live on the mainnet in May 2023. IOHK, the company behind Cardano, described Hydra on X as “a family of layer 2 protocols designed to make Cardano more scalable and adaptable for various use cases that require fast and cheap transactions.”

In an earlier X thread, Pellerin expressed his excitement about bringing Doom, a groundbreaking first-person shooter game, to Hydra. This is a big step for Cardano and blockchain gaming. Pellerin even reminisced about playing Doom as a 16-year-old.

Cardano YODA, another influential community member, pointed out on X that playing Doom on Cardano via Hydra is advantageous because, as an off-chain solution, the massive amounts of data generated by the game won’t be stored on-chain, unlike on Solana.