At a technical level, v1.0.0 consolidates months of incremental changes into a package that’s been tested with cardano-node 10.1.2 and cardano-cli 10.1.1.0. The build introduces a beta of incremental commits, allowing funds to be committed to a running Head; adds a –deposit-deadline parameter so operators can define how long a node should watch for deposits before enabling safe recovery; and rewrites the commit and initial scripts in Aiken, moving the initial script to Plutus V3 and shrinking it by 1,337 bytes.
One consequential trade-off appears in the commit-path rewrite: the documented maximum number of Head participants is now eight. The release also notes API refinements (for example, a POST /transaction endpoint) and persistence format changes tied to more efficient snapshot handling.
For builders, these specifics matter because Hydra’s promise has always been pragmatic rather than purely theoretical: execute fast, low-cost transactions off-chain inside a Head while preserving Cardano’s extended-UTXO semantics, then fan the final state back to L1.
Beneath the headline peak, telemetry circulating during the qualifier rounds showed sustained readings in the hundreds of thousands of TPS, with community dashboards and posts commonly citing plateaus around ~650,000 TPS before the Las Vegas finale pushed beyond the seven-figure mark.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.816.
