For many people who are invested in IOHK’s Cardano network, it is more than just the function of its price. Earlier this month, Cardano Community reported about having surpassed two million ADA wallets.

Focus 2022

IOHK CEO, Charles Hoskinson is also looking optimistic about how the project is coming together. He recently stated,

“I’m really loving how the roadmap for 2022 Cardano is coming together. It’s a living ecosystem, growing, refining, adapting, and becoming stronger.”

In a recent blog post, the company behind Cardano also discussed how it will optimize network performance over time. It noted that Cardano’s focus going forward will shift to optimizing, which was initially at providing core capability and correctness. IOHK’s Tim Harrison stated,

“As the network grows and Cardano functions at a higher capacity, we will be adjusting the parameterization to keep up with network demand.”

Network congestion

In the context of recent congestions experienced due to large NFT drops, it is looking to build “more efficient traffic systems” for the near term.

“In the short term, we’ll be able to ease NFT drop congestion by more evenly spreading the stake distribution and reward distribution computation. “

Also noting that some developers are already producing such systems specifically for NFT drops, it is also likely to ‘reduce costs.’

Moreover, IOHK stated that the network is designed to be “highly resilient even under heavy saturation.” Therefore, the “‘congestion’ period lasted for less than one hour,” when it experienced a large number of simultaneous NFT transactions.

Nonetheless, IOHK promised ‘gradual upgrades that will be implemented over the course of the next few months.’

What’s next?

With a focus on boosting network performance, Harrison also pronounced a likely waiting time between transaction submission and transaction adoption. Additionally, Cardano will also investigate increasing block size, Mempool size, and script compression among other alternatives for that optimization.

“We also plan to move the ledger state to disk storage to ease the on-chain load…”

With that, Cardano’s “Hydra is set to bring additional capability in the mid-term.” In that context, Hoskinson had recently stated,

“It’ll be able to offload a large amount of the transaction traffic that’s going to come from all of the apps that are coming (soon). As PAB comes online, Cardano is going to get hammered by an enormous amount of traffic. Hydra is a necessity for that…”

In the long term, there are likely to be more updates around the Ouroboros protocol.