HYDRA CHAIN

Permissionless, Inflationary POS blockchain with fixed fiat transaction fees and a unique
burning mechanism on generated transactional economy

Key Features:

🔥 100% Burn of all Transaction Fees

💎 50% Royalty on Gas for Smart Contract Creators → More Info

📌 Fixed Coin Transaction Fees of $0.20 → More Info

📌 Fixed Token Transaction Fees of $0.50 → More Info

💰 20% Minimum APR Staking Income → Staking Calculator

📈 Up to 540 TPS Elastic Capacity

🔏 EVM Compatible Smart Contract Platform

⚙️ Wallet-Level Scalability → More Info

🗳 Unique Decentralized Governance Protocol

⚖️ 18.5M Starting Supply with unique approach for handling the deflation tipping point. → More
Info

1. Introduction

In the recent past, many misrepresented blockchain as something magical that

automatically solves any problem. This whitepaper tells an interesting story of how a team
that acquired extensive experience in building and growing a business in a not yet matured
technological environment has used this unique knowledge in effectively iterating the
business-oriented Hydra blockchain. A blockchain developer that had a unique practical
usage perspective as a DaPP developer first. A perspective that has put the focus on critical
economic limitations of existing chains and resulted in a unique blockchain economy.
1.1 The backstory

Back in 2018, the team behind the project LockTrip has published a document labeled
“LockTrip Blockchain Manifest” which has become the fundamental design document of
the Hydra Chain. The document was based on actual hurdles that were encountered as part
of the development of the LockTrip DaPP.

As a strategy to come up with the best solution, the team has undertaken an evolutionary
approach where it built Hydra on top of available open source technology, that has gone
through the test of time — a successful strategy used by some of the current biggest
blockchains (e.g Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Qtum and many more).

The philosophy behind Hydra is to implement critical economic features while utilizing
proven technology for data transmission. Hydra is a permissionless, open-source,
proof-of-stake blockchain built on top of open-source projects QTUM, Bitcoin, Ethereum
and BlackCoin’s PoV v3, designed by Pavel Vasin. Hydra is supercharged with a number of
unique economic features and a truly decentralized architecture.

2. Blockchain Economy 2.0 - Solving urgent problems

2.1 Solving the “Total Supply” problem - Total supply has been one of the most overly
abused terms in the blockchain industry. The reason for this in part is because of the
common assumption that supply, as an isolated metric, represents some form of exclusive
value.

More often than not, projects are compared based on their total supply in a “[project x] has
less supply than [project y], therefore is more valuable” manner. Due to this excessive
trend, one could argue that “total supply” has become more of a marketing component than
an actual economic determinant.

The origin of this comes from the psychological perception of how (in)accessible a
particular unit is within a system -> therefore potentially leading to Scarcity.

Scarcity in the economy refers to the gap between limited resources and theoretically
limitless wants.
In what may sound as a trivial point, it is still important to emphasize that scarcity as a
concept is coherent with units that are the non-divisible form that are yet functional to
their main purpose.

Satoshi Nakamoto has created a brilliant system for its time in 2008 that has put the
genesis of the blockchain industry into play. There is however a common misconception of
how Bitcoin’s economy should be interpreted as most people are disregarding several
critical factors.

The ideology behind Hydra is based one the concept that supply is just one of the 4 key
components that determine a given economic design as a geometry and the subsequent
theoretical scarcity arising from it.
- Starting supply - supply is considered as a starting point which can go up or down
depending on the design, usage of the chain and the integrated
deflationary/inflationary mechanisms on protocol level.
- Node economy degradation over time (relative to market cap) - this is a critical
factor since the node infrastructure has a fundamental implication on the whole
system. A degrading node economy inevitably leads to a disparity between network
value and the node security which on its end could lead to systemic failure. Node
economy degradation should be 0 or negative. If positive, this would mean the
whole system is increasing out of proportion to the security that supports it.
- Rate of Supply Change - the immutable mechanics embedded on protocol level that
define the rate of change as a vector of the starting supply over time. A negative rate
of change means the blockchain is burning coin supply and hence having a
deflationary vector towards potential scarcity. A positive rate of change means the
supply is in an inflationary state
- Transactional economy efficiency - signaling the impact transactions make on the
economic design

The 4 components must be examined collectively to make an informed decision of the

economic geometry with all implied risks and the theoretical scarcity of a given blockchain.

For instance, Bitcoin had a starting supply of 0, with a hyper-inflationary setting (mined
1.5M coins just in the first year) economy which transitions to a fixed supply economy over
a very long period of time. The transition happens via hard-coded halving events that take
place once every 4 years with each event happening at a predetermined block and having a
50% income cut on the output rewards.
Bitcoin’s rate of supply change is currently positive and will at best go down to “0” once the
full amount is mined. One could argue that there is a “deflation” factor arising from the
nature of the usage of Bitcoin, such as loss of private keys, death, human error etc, but that
characteristic is applicable to every single cryptocurrency per current standards and
therefore needs to be excluded from the equation.

Additionally the hard-coded halvings come as shockwaves to the node infrastructure

economy, as each halving translates to an overnight 50% income cut that the miners need
to adapt to. Such income cuts can only be compensated via price appreciation which is
completely out of the control of the system.

The more the value of the coin increases out of proportion to the node mining power, the
more attractive a theoretical 51% attack becomes even if the scale of the chain grows as
well.
As observed on the image below, it can be seen that with the hash rate of 12th Jan 2021, a 1
hour Bitcoin 51% attack would cost approximately $716,072. This might seem as if a
significant barrier, but in reality it should be considered from the risk/reward perspective

In theory it would take $716,072 to overtake complete control of a 355B economy for 1
hour. It is important to emphasize that orchestrating such an attack is much harder
because of the lack of capacity to dynamically rent such hashing power without a more
significant investment (in the billions of dollars). In fact, this physical limitation is the only
line of defense that protects the network from such a potential attack. This line of defense
could change as production technology advances.
If we observe the 1 year chart of Bitcoin Hash Rate, it can be seen that it has increased
approximately with 40% (starting from 110m range and ending in the 145m range) which
represents a ~32% increase in hash rate. The hash rate is a direct representation of the
security of the network against malicious actors.

And here is a chart for the same period of the price appreciation of Bitcoin that defines the
 total market cap. Bitcoin has increased 500% over the same period of time:

The disparity between the Hash Power increase and the value of the economy governed by
it, generates an inverted risk in favor of an attack that accumulates over time.

The node economy degradation factor can be calculated by dividing the BTC logarithmic
price change by the hash price appreciation for the same timeframe. In our case that would
be using 500% with 32% which means:

5 / 0.32 = 16.12

The mining economy has advanced 16.12 times less, compared to the market cap that it
safeguards. And once the next halving kicks in, this number will be further worsened. With
the continuous halvings that are to come, a negative probability outcome accumulates and
the likelihood of collapse under a 51% attack increases. Such an adverse event can be in 5
years or 10 years, but the probability can only increase over time if the current trend
persists.

The above example should not be misunderstood as an attempt to discredit Bitcoin as a

technology as the whole team behind HYDRA pays the deepest form of respect to its
founders and community. The fact that HYDRA is based on Bitcoin further reaffirms this.
But nevertheless it intends to showcase why it is critically important to design the
economy with this particular factor in mind.
The miners (POW) and the validators (POS) are the absolute core of the system. They
protect the data and the funds of all actors and therefore should not be left behind.

Satoshi Nakamoto created a system back in 2008 that today has become the victim of its
own success. Twelve years ago, there is a high probability that Nakamoto hadn't thought
that BTC would come to a price of $40,000+. The idea was to have an efficient system
where transactions compensate for the continuously diminishing inflation based income.
Today, the reality couldn’t be further away from the truth.

At the moment of writing this whitepaper, Bitcoin’s transactional economy is in a

monstrous disparity when compared to the inflationary economy. Just to give an example,
the total BTC fees paid in 12th Jan are equivalent to $4.884M, whereas the inflation driven block
rewards is in the $32M range.

Bitcoin has experienced a sweetspot where its demand, market dominance, as well as node
infrastructure economy have intertwined in a mutual state of culmination. This took place
in the period of 2014 - 2018. As it can be seen from LUXOR’s Hasprice Index, mid 2018, the
miner revenue per TH has been between 20x more attractive than what it has been
throughout 2020.
A very important consideration is the fact that hash power has increased in addition to the
drop of the revenue per TH. This technically means a significant negative trend in BTC
mining economy.

This sweet spot where the hardcoded mining economy settings, mining equipment
production costs, electricity costs overlapped with the market dynamics of BTC with
literally no competition have ended.

To further add to the problem, the diminishing miner economy has made conventional
CPUs inefficient. Due to this, highly specialized hardware production has become the
standard for mining and the only way to compensate for the economic degradation. The
side effect of this niched hardware deployment has literally destroyed the concept of
decentralization as there are a handful of companies manufacturing the devices that are
being used for mining.

Then the specialized devices are further consolidated into 21 mining pools, that currently
output 99% of Bitcoin’s collective hash power.
These are BTC’s mining pools. The level of authority the administrators of these pools have
is significant.
An important consideration is also the geographic distribution of the mining equipment.
According to University of Cambridge’s BTC mining map, at the moment 65% of mining
power is based in China which on its end is 99.9% distributed in few consolidated pools.

This defies the nature of decentralization, because a single entity - the Chinese
government has a super majority control via its policymaking on the current global hash
power of Bitcoin. And since Hash power means security, this translates to the Chinese
government safeguarding the global Bitcoin economic network. A situation which isn’t
likely to change in the near future.
HYDRA learns from all of these economic flaws and iterates a dynamic, healthy economic
geometry instead of a hardcoded one with predetermined halvings.

HYDRA solves the fundamental problem of handling total supply on a completely

different level.
Questions such as “When will the next halving take place?”, “What will happen with price
after the halving?”, “Will the network collapse if block rewards disappear?” are no longer
relevant, because total supply is the direct representation of the actual usage of the chain.
This also gives a fair and transparent tool for all actors to properly interpret the total
supply and its relation to transactions and price. It also eliminates speculation arising from
communicating “total supply” - perhaps one of the most abused metrics in blockchain.

In HYDRA’s design, total supply as a monetary base is entirely determined by the market.
This makes the system extremely resilient to uncontrolled inflation and severe price drops
as it is able to effectively capture transactions and use them to counterbalance the supply
through the constant burn process.

- HYDRA has a fixed, predictable and attractive mining economy -> If the
transactional economy is weak, inflation will dominate during the growth phase and
subsidize the nodes until the moment transactions activity increases
- HYDRA burns all transaction costs -> If the transactional economy is strong,
deflation will dominate, and the supply will at some point decline potentially
reverting the staking rewards that came through inflation in the seed growth phase
of the chain. In the meantime nodes will always have a predictable income that will
guarantee maximum security of users’ funds.

Protection against inflation driven price degradation - enabling sustainable transactional

economy deflation as a background process

At its core, a Fiat Price Oracle always updates the current FIAT value equivalent of HYDRA
coin. Gas price is defined in fiat and then adjusted according to the USD exchange rate.

In addition, there is a unique feature that enables the whole chain to burn up to 50% of all
transaction gas paid by users on the protocol level.

The combination of the a) fiat fixed fees + b) ability to burn transactional gas + c) high
inflation rate creates a unique economic powerhouse, that safeguards security by
providing high and at the same time predictable staking income to node infrastructure
while offering significant protection against inflation price degradation due to the capacity
to use the transactional economy as a way to stimulate deflation.

No other chain is solving this problem. Most blockchains usually apply a pre-determined
“halving” in time-dependent events that are completely irrelevant from what the actual
economy and usage of a particular chain are, and thus expose the whole network at risk.
Uncontrolled inflation on the other hand poses the risk of degradation of price in time.
Predicting when to change state and how exactly to do it is impossible, which is why
HYDRA enables inflation to combat deflation as a background process and leave the market
to determine it.

Two unique economic streams in a constant “battle” depending on the actual usage of the
chain. At the launch, inflation will be dominating the chain and provide an attractive
stimulus to staking nodes.

This on its end will grow the infrastructure as a combined network value. As the
infrastructure value grows, adoption should follow that on its end will stimulate
transactions.

As more transactions are generated, the burn rate will begin to cut supply.

Hydra stimulates infrastructure and community growth while offering protection against
price degradation due to its ability to convert transaction gas into a permanent supply cut.

This also means that HYDRA solves one of the most difficult challenges with blockchains -
How and When to switch a blockchain from an inflation state to a deflation without
excessive risk. As an example, a halving type of sudden switch to deflation and complete
stop on block rewards imply that there should be a transactional economy, powerful
enough to sustain the same level of economic demand by the existing nodes.

With Hydra, this is possible due to the ability of up to 100% on transaction fees to be
destroyed permanently on protocol level without affecting the staking economy. Think of it
as a separate process.

On top of that, the fiat oracle empowers transaction Gas Burn specifically if HYDRA price
starts to degrade. This comes as natural protection against severe price degradation.
Scenario 1)
For instance, if a standard HYDRA transfer costs $0.2 and HYDRA price is $0.5, that would
mean that a transaction would cost 0.4 HYDRA. With a 50% burn setting, 0.2 HYDRA will be
destroyed.

Scenario 2)
Imagine that HYDRA price drops to $0.1. Due to the increased velocity, same $0.2 will now
cost 2 HYDRA due to the lower HYDRA/USD rate. With a 50% burn setting, 1 HYDRA will
be destroyed permanently.

The more HYDRA USD price falls, the higher the burning efficiency is due to the increased
velocity.

You can use the Staking Calculator to try out more advanced combinations

With HYDRA total supply is no more a predetermined setting.

As it has been demonstrated with all successful blockchains, during the seed/inception
phase, inflation dominates over transactions. This is normal as it takes time to grow the
decentralized infrastructure and build a strong community. The weighted average is 4-5
years for accumulating a strong transactional economy which would follow afterwards.

If after 5 years HYDRA is to reach 5 transactions per second, which is around 1% of its
current burst bandwidth capacity (up to 520 tps). Depending on the price of HYDRA, the
network could switch from a relatively neutral state to extreme deflation.

To elaborate what this would look like:

- A $0.5 price would generate -33 HYDRA per block -> From that moment onward the
monetary base will start to decline and potentially start to revert the supply that had been
created as part of the initial seed/growth phase of the chain. A $0.5 price would translate
to 19M market cap with a hypothetically projected 16.3M HYDRA burnt over a course of 12
months.

- A $1 price would generate -1.15 HYDRA per block -> Again a slight deflation, while still
yielding 51% income to stakers

Let's hypothetically assume that price degrades severely for some reasons and it falls down
to $0.1.
That would immediately lead to a -289 HYDRA burn per single block with the same rate of 5
transactions per second. That burn rate will take out 195,075 HYDRA from circulation per
day. Within one month, if the variables remain unchanged, 5.8M HYDRA will be destroyed
permanently, reverting the inflation that took years to achieve.

In that same scenario, even if the network runs at 1 transaction per second, that would
make a -33 HYDRA per block. Its strong design make it utilize even the most basic layer of
transactional economy coming from transactions related to:
- basic wallet-to-wallet transfers
- exchange activity, daytrading, trading
- tokens, stabletokens
- community activity
The above types of transactions are usually inseparable from a coin economy and grow
together with the popularity and market cap, reaching potentially tens of thousands per
day.

Additionally, there’s also the opportunity of products and specialized commercial dApp
developers to build on top and supplement this economy.

2.2 The Balance between TPS and Decentralization

The premise of blockchain technology has always been its ability to be resistant against
manipulation and censorship. The two most popular blockchains Bitcoin and Ethereum
have strived exactly because of this revolutionary idea of not having to trust a single entity
or rely on the decisions of a few selected individuals.

Yet, this powerful idea comes at a high cost. The more nodes participate in the validation of
blocks, the more difficult it becomes to synchronize vast amounts of data across the entire
network. This fundamental bottleneck has become the main trade-off debate in the
industry and has resulted in many projects sacrificing decentralization for insanely high
TPS (transactions per second) capacities. The problem is, that the moment a blockchain
relies on a few selected nodes for its operation, it has given up the idea of censorship
resistance. There are many such examples out there, which will not be further discussed in
the context of this whitepaper.
The Hydra chain on the other hand holds true to the fundamental qualities a blockchain
should offer and bases advancements on proven and 100% decentralized blockchain
infrastructures. A special focus lies on improving the overall capacity to approximately 75 -
85 TPS without sacrificing decentralization, which puts the daily transaction limit at 6.5 -
7.3 Million transactions. For comparison, this represents a 6-fold improvement over the
Ethereum network at the time of writing.

The Hydra chain in its core is based on the open-source production level Qtum blockchain,
which on its own is a fork of Bitcoin Core with an Account Abstraction Layer that enables
support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This hybrid blockchain solution utilizes
the well-established UTXO transaction model and employs a true Proof-of-Stake
consensus, which has been evolved from the BlackCoin project. We are undertaking the
evolutionary strategy of combining the best of Bitcoin and Ethereum and building on top of
it a proprietary blockchain that is capable of preserving decentralization, supporting
Ethereum applications and at the same time reaching notable TPS performance.

2.3 Unpredictable Transaction Fees

Business developers need to know the exact costs associated with the building parts of
their businesses. Since blockchain is essentially a transaction based technology, not
knowing how much a transaction will cost, practically means not knowing if the businesses
built on it will be viable or not.

Ethereum and Bitcoin’s current consensus mechanism is Proof-of-Work based (POW) and
as such, the costs associated with the validation of each transaction are defined by the
miners that process the underlying layer through an auction mechanism. This essentially
means that the blockchain businesses, investors and users have no idea on how much the
miners will require at any moment in future to support the network and validate the
transactions.

The chart below showing the Ethereum gas price history for the past 4 years illustrates
how dramatic changes can happen in a very short period of time. Over the course of a few
weeks, the gas price has grown from 10 gwei to over 150 gwei - a 15x increase.
The intra-day volatility is even more radical. Throughout August and September 2020,
Ethereum participants have experienced gas prices ranging from 30 to 700 gwei within the
same day. This was mainly fueled by a strong upward trend in decentralized liquidity pools,
which consume a lot of gas due to the involvement of multiple smart contracts in a single
transaction.

The sudden changes resulted in smart-contract based transactions to reach fees of $200
and above. Perhaps the biggest problem with this is that there is no theoretical limit as to
how high the fees can grow. Business developers have no guarantee that they won’t be
seeing an absurdly high level tomorrow. This lack of predictability represents a big obstacle
to mainstream adoption and can turn otherwise healthy business unsustainable over time.

The Hydra chain achieves transactional gas cost predictability through a governed and
stable gas price protocol. The gas price will be governed by the nodes through a voting
mechanism and will be bound in fiat equivalent. The fiat rate will be governed by an Oracle
that will monitor exchanges where the underlying HYDRA cryptocurrency will be traded
on. The end result will be a blockchain that has a fixed price per transaction in USD
equivalent, irrespective of the HYDRA rate, thus giving network participants the stability
they need.

2.4 Capturing the Transactional Economy

The transactional economy is the lifeblood of the blockchain. It is what fuels the ecosystem,
ensures the safety of the network and keeps a healthy balance between users and
validators. At the time of writing, the transactional economy of Ethereum has reached
$3.5M per day (excluding block rewards) and $1M per day for Bitcoin.

What this means is that a vast amount of value is being transferred out of the network to
blockchain-agnostic mining companies. They usually keep a multi-chain operation where
they quickly repurpose their computational power to the blockchain with the most
profitable rewards and then sooner or later liquidate their earnings to re-invest into more
computational power.

Although these rewards are rightfully earned for keeping the blockchain secure, it also
means that the ecosystem is missing out on a significant part of its economy - block by
block. The lifeblood, as described earlier, is flowing out of the body. The ultimate flaw in
this model is that those who keep the chain secure are not tied to the actual chain in any
way. The validating processors don’t care about which blockchain they keep safe on that
particular moment and their owners have no economic interest in the well-being of a
particular chain, due to their ability to quickly repurpose their resources.

The Hydra chain solves this shortcoming by utilizing a Version 3 Proof of Stake mechanism
developed by Pavel Vasin. Through this step, the Hydra chain is capturing 100% of the
transactional economy and re-distributing it to those who not only work for the security of
the network, but also own part of its supply. This effectively makes the chain self-sufficient
and eliminates any external dependencies.

2.5 Environmental and Economic Sustainability

The Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, which was first introduced with Bitcoin, has paved
the way to decentralization. The value of BTC grew together with the overall network size,
but so did the incentive to set up an ever increasing machinery of increasingly powerful
and energy-consuming processors. On one side this was a very positive outcome and even
needed for the health of the chain. Because the more processors are working to keep the
chain secure, the more expensive it becomes to launch a 51% attack. The massive increase
in energy consumption was built into the very system as an integral component.

The downside of this is the massive waste that results out of the competition to burn as
much energy as possible by utilizing an ever renewing set of processing equipment.
Needless to say, it is not a sustainable model for the environment. The above mentioned
Proof of Stake consensus model removes the unnecessary calculations from the equation
and reduces the work-load to a minimal computing power, which is orders of magnitudes
lower and can easily be managed by most computing devices available at retail stores. As a
result, the impact on the environment is negligible.
As pressing as the environmental component is, there is one component that is even more
important to the success of any chain: its economical sustainability, which is directly linked
to its security against external attacks. So far we have outlined a number of shortcomings
of Bitcoin and other blockchains, but they all fade away compared to the significance of the
systemic risk Bitcoin carries.

Regardless of whether a blockchain uses POW or POS to establish consensus, the security
of it is directly correlated to the block rewards it offers as an incentive for security. For
POW blockchains it establishes itself in the amount of computing power attackers need to
compete. For POS blockchain it is the amount of coins being staked that present the safety
barrier. In both cases the chain competes for these resources with alternative investment
opportunities across the globe. The higher the market cap of the blockchain, the bigger the
incentive for attackers. In contrast, the security correlates with the block rewards. This
results in the following security factor for a given blockchain:

Security Factor = Resources Securing the Network / Market Capitalization

In the example of Bitcoin, the block rewards are being halved every 4 years. Since the
rewards are distributed in BTC and the market capitalization is also directly correlated to
BTC, the formula can be simplified to:

Security Factor = BTC Rewards Per Year / BTC Supply

As is public knowledge, the rewards keep halving every 4 years, while the supply of BTC is
growing with every mined block. This means that the security factor is dropping by a tiny
amount every block and additionally is being halved every 4 years. No one knows if and
when this will translate to a 51% attack, but it is certainly possible that the experiment may
have a very bad outcome one day.

The Hydra chain solves this by introducing inflation-based block rewards, which can be
regularly voted on through the democratic governance protocol by coin holders. This not
only incentivizes holders to stake their coins, but also allows for a high security factor to be
maintained, making the chain sustainable.

2.6 Adaptation and Community Involvement

The world is constantly changing. Businesses, economies and technologies need to adapt to
the new scenarios on a regular basis. This is even more true in the crypto environment,
where innovations are being tested in rapid cycles and experiments are popping up
everywhere. In contrast to this, most blockchains are highly static and inflexible. Even small
changes can end up as huge challenges, both in terms of technical implementation and
community support.

We have seen hard forks not working as intended and communities being disunited due to
their different views on the proposed changes. Such events pose significant risks to the
chain and can cause serious damage to the project.

To combat this risk, the Hydra chain inherits a decentralized governance protocol and is
designed to adapt to many different scenarios in a harmless and constructive way. A
number of blockchain settings are possible to be voted on by coin holders and can thus be
changed “on the fly” as required. This gives the chain a very good flexibility and allows the
community to steer it into the right direction in a peaceful process.

The settings that can be voted on are listed below:

- Adding new admins (these can initiate a new voting)

- Removing admins
- Changing the Gas limit per KB (UTXO layer)
- Changing the Gas/Fiat rate (EVM Layer Gas)
- Changing the block size
- Modifying the transactional economy (reimbursement to token creators with range 0%
- 50%)
- Modifying the protocol burn rate (range 0% - 50%)
- Modifying the protocol inflation rate (range 0% - 25%)

Proposals can be pushed by elected admins within certain predefined limits. The voting
process works by sending coins to the smart contract with the desired outcome. The smart
contract with the higher coin amount at the end of the voting period will determine the
outcome. All coins will be burnt thereafter, turning high-value disputes about certain
proposals beneficial to the ecosystem.

In addition to the voting process, coin holders also have very easy access to the block
validation mechanism and can earn passive income just by maintaining the network with
the holdings. Contrary to the POW blockchain, the entry barrier on the Hydra chain is close
to zero as no expensive equipment or minimum coin amount is required. This not only
increases the involvement of the community with the chain they are growing, but also
allows for a much better decentralization as anyone can create an independent node and
contribute to the network.
2.7 Establishing a Truly Shared Economy

Most people in the crypto industry experience the space as a gambling environment either
in the role of traders, investors or simply by betting on random coins and tokens. The
reasons for this are likely many, but one obvious reason is that most blockchains are not
really sharing their economy at protocol level, which leaves price movements as the only
option left. A good example was given in section 2.3, where the transactional economy is
being funneled outside of the network. In contrast, the Hydra chain preserves it within the
network and rewards network participants for their contributions. But this is not the only
difference.

Chains that support smart contract functionality such as Ethereum do not incentivize
developers for their contribution to the network. The only incentive for them is to build a
profitable business around the chain, which is a strong limiting factor to the overall
development of the ecosystem. There are many useful applications that do not necessarily
allow for a profit to be applied.

The Hydra chain solves this important gap at protocol-level by enabling a reimbursement
of transaction fees to token creators. The mechanism effectively rewards project owners
based on the transactional economy they create, by getting a share of each transaction
their token was involved with. Adjustments to the reimbursement rate can be made by
voting on it with a range between 0% and 50%. Combined with the staking mechanism, this
creates a truly shared environment, where network participants are rewarded on all levels
for the value they add to the ecosystem.

3. Blockchain with an Economy like no other

3.1 Compound Inflation Based Block Rewards

The inflation mechanism is a key component of the Hydra chain and shapes its economy
fundamentally.

The inflation of HYDRA is fixed as a compound percentage to the total supply. This is to
incentivize members to take active part in staking and to ensure the income does not
degrade over time. Halvings and the lack of predictability, combined with the volatile
nature of gas fees are critical economic features that Hydra solves without compromising
permissionless decentralization.

The inflation formula works as follow:

[inflation rate%] x [total coin supply] / blocks per year

"inflation rate%" being the changeable parameter that can be casted with a community vote
and will be limited within a 0% - 25% range.

This technically means that, with 18,585,933 HYDRA coins as a total initial supply and the
default 128 second block time (246,375 blocks per year), the calculation would look as
follows: /based on a 0 gas fees for the particular sample blocks and a 20% inflation rate/

● block 1 (0.2 x 18,585,933)/246,375 = 15.08751537290715 HYDRAs per block as a reward

and a new total supply of 18,585,948.08751537
● block 2 (0.2 x 18,585,948.08751537 )/246,375 = 15.08752762050969 HYDRA block
reward
(and the cumulative increase continuing to grow)

3.2 Why high inflation is critical

Blockchains are essentially aiming for network neutrality, stability, and predictability.
Without those three factors, it would be impossible to build sustainable and economically
significant applications on top of them.

Bitcoin, in its initial phase, was actually a project in a hyper-inflation state. Giving
enormous predictability to all actors through substantial mining rewards.

Over a period of just 12 months, the circulating Bitcoins increased from 50 to 1.7M. Needless
to say that this translates to a massive inflation rate.
The irony is that almost every Bitcoin holder purchases BTC with the perspective of buying
a deflationary asset, while at the same time not realizing that the current state is quite the
opposite as BTC is still in high inflation mode. To further emphasize this paradox, few BTC
owners realize that the current economy behind bitcoin is unsustainable in the context of a
complete switch to deflation.

Simple math can prove this:

Block reward 6.25 BTC every 10 minutes = translates to an approximate $80,000 value per
block created through inflation / $11.5M in 24 hour timespan.

At the same time, the current average 24h transaction count is in the 310,000 range. A $0.5
per transaction would imply a $157,500 transactional economy.

The transactional economy amounts to 1.3% of the total economy. A theoretical complete
switch from Inflation to deflation at this point would lead to a 98.7% collapse of
infrastructure security.
While Hydra is not aiming to reach such high inflation rates, depending on the proportion
of the stakers, rates could rise significantly nevertheless.

This is why we believe that for an underlying blockchain platform, a predictable and high
inflation rate is the best economic driver as it safeguards the network security, while
tokens built on top should be deflationary. This is specifically the case with HYDRA, as it is
complemented by LOC as a fixed supply deflationary HRC20 token.

Staking Rewards

Coin holders, who are planning to keep their coins for the long term have the opportunity
to grow the amount of coins they own by staking them. As a mechanism this rewards the
core community most and strengthens the security of the chain.
The inflation rate has a default setting of 20% and can be voted on as part of the
Distributed Governance Protocol (DGP) by holders within the range of 0% and 25%. The
voting will be held in regular intervals, giving the network enough flexibility to adapt to
external and internal factors.

Due to the fact that not everyone will stake, the APR could end up being significantly higher
than the inflation setting.

Example 1:

- Inflation rate set at 10%

- 40% of total supply being staked

→ APR = 10% / 0.4 = 25%

Example 2:

- Inflation rate set at 20%

- 20% of total supply being staked

→ APR = 20% / 0.2 = 100%

APR = Annual Percentage Return

The calculations above are based on inflation based block rewards only. On top of these,
there will also be income arising from the fixed fees on a transaction basis, which will be
voted on through the governance protocol and distributed with each block individually.

3.2 Flexibility to change between Inflationary and Deflationary State

Even though the Hydra Chain can be set at high inflation, there is also the functionality to
turn it into a deflationary economy, if needed. For this to happen, the following two
settings need to be enabled through votings:

1. The Inflation rate must be voted to 0%

2. The Burn rate must be voted to a value above 0%
This combination will effectively decrease the supply of coins over time, as a share of each
transaction fee will be removed at protocol level. On the flipside, this will result in a
significantly lower APR for stakers, as they will rely on the transactional economy solely.

Other Paths to Deflation

Although the above approach will certainly lead to deflation, there are also paths to
deflation with inflation switched on. As outlined in Chapter 2, the only criteria for this is a
strong transactional economy.

If there is enough activity on chain, the transactional economy can dwarf the staking
rewards coming from inflation and thus coins can be burnt at a faster rate than they are
created. We have created a highly functional staking calculator to explore this behavior (see
section 3 of the calculator). You can access it from the link below.

Staking Calculator

4. Unique democratic governance that monetizes differences

Hydra offers a significantly enhanced governance protocol that provides the tools to its
community to debate, vote and adjust the chain based on the preference of the majority.
Without such tools, as history has proven, community differences can escalate and lead to
forks that dilute the value of a chain. In addition to that, Hydra also effectively monetizes
these differences.

A user friendly simple voting, embedded within the Hydra wallet, enables every single
community member the ability to cast his/her vote by sending HYDRA to the vote smart
contract. A system that accumulates HYDRA in favor of a “yes” and “no” with the side that
has the biggest balance automatically being enforced from a certain block in the future.

Example

Vote for change of the Burn Rate on protocol level

Yes: 1,048 HYDRA

No: 958 HYDRA
Final outcome “Yes” wins. 2,006 HYDRA burnt as part of the process. A system that is
protected against abuse and manipulation as each vote consumes the economy.
The more votes and the stronger the disagreement, the higher the economic benefit for all
HYDRA owners as the higher the probability for more votes to be casted

Hydra goes on to the extent of enabling automated voting for critical features that other
projects don’t modify.

Block size and Block time being perhaps the most difficult ones.

5. Technical Specifications of the network

The Hydra Chain in its core is based on the open-source production level Qtum
blockchain, which on its own is a fork of Bitcoin Core with an Account Abstraction Layer
that enables support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

This hybrid blockchain utilizes the well-established UTXO transaction model and employs a
true Proof-of-Stake consensus, which has been evolved from the BlackCoin project. We are
undertaking the evolutionary strategy of combining the best of Bitcoin and Ethereum and
building on top of it, unique economic features, while preserving decentralization,
supporting Ethereum applications and at the same time reaching notable TPS performance.

EVM offers full support of ERC20 as well as all other Ethereum compatible smart contracts.
Full migration compatibility from Ethereum (or any other EVM supporting blockchain) to
Hydra.

5.1 Proof-of-Stake consensus

Hydra utilizes “PoS V3”. Designed by Pavel Vasin - technology that has been proven as safe
and effective by projects BlackCoin and Qtum

A brief history about the development of the technology:

(Some extracts of this section have been sourced from technical blog post made on [Link] to
which we have applied small adaptations)

PoSv1 - Originally implemented in project Peercoin. It relied heavily on the notion of "coin
age", or how long a UTXO has not been spent on the blockchain. It's implementation would
basically make it so that the higher the coin age, the more the difficulty is reduced. This
had the bad side-effect however of encouraging people to only open their wallet every
month or longer for staking. Assuming the coins were all relatively old, they would almost
instantaneously produce new staking blocks. This however made double-spend attacks
easy to execute. Peercoin itself is not affected by this because it is a hybrid PoW and PoS
blockchain, so the PoW blocks mitigated this effect.

PoSv2 - This version removed coin age completely from consensus, as well as using a
completely different stake modifier mechanism from v1. The number of technical
modifications are significant. All of this was done to remove coin age from consensus and
make it a safe consensus mechanism without requiring a PoW/PoS hybrid blockchain to
mitigate various attacks.

PoSv3 - PoSv3 is really more of an incremental improvement over PoSv2. In PoSv2 the stake
modifier also included the previous block time. This was removed to prevent a
"short-range" attack where it was possible to iteratively mine an alternative blockchain by
iterating through previous block times. PoSv2 used block and transaction times to
determine the age of a UTXO; this is not the same as coin age, but rather is the "minimum
confirmations required" before a UTXO can be used for staking. This was changed to a
much simpler mechanism where the age of a UTXO is determined by it's depth in the
blockchain. This thus doesn't incentivize inaccurate timestamps to be used on the
blockchain, and is also more immune to "timewarp" attacks. PoSv3 also added support for
OP_RETURN coinstake transactions which allows for a vout to contain the public key for
signing the block without requiring a full pay-to-pubkey script.

Proof of Stake's Protocol Structures and Rule

● Impossible to counterfeit a block

● Big players do not get disproportionally bigger rewards
● More computing power is not useful for creating blocks
● No one member of the network can control the entire blockchain

The kernel hash is composed of several pieces of data that are not readily modifiable in the
current block. And so, because the miners do not have an easy way to modify the kernel
hash, they can not simply iterate through a large amount of hashes like in PoW.

Proof of Stake blocks add many additional consensus rules in order to realize it's goals.
First, unlike in PoW, the coinbase transaction (the first transaction in the block) must be
empty and reward 0 tokens. Instead, to reward stakers, there is a special "stake transaction"
which must be the 2nd transaction in the block. A stake transaction is defined as any
transaction that:

Has at least 1 valid vin

It's first vout must be an empty script
It's second vout must not be empty
Furthermore, staking transactions must abide by these rules to be valid in a block:

The second vout must be either a pubkey (not pubkeyhash!) script, or an OP_RETURN
script that is unspendable (data-only) but stores data for a public key
The timestamp in the transaction must be equal to the block timestamp
the total output value of a stake transaction must be less than or equal to the total inputs
plus the PoS block reward plus the block's total transaction fees. output <= (input +
block_reward + tx_fees)

The first spent vin's output must be confirmed by at least 500 blocks (in other words, the
coins being spent must be at least 500 blocks old)

Though more vins can be used and spent in a staking transaction, the first vin is the only
one used for consensus parameters.

These rules ensure that the stake transaction is easy to identify, and ensures that it gives
enough info to the blockchain to validate the block. The empty vout method is not the only
way staking transactions could have been identified, but this was the original design from
Sunny King and has worked well enough.

Rules for PoS blocks:

● Must have exactly 1 staking transaction

● The staking transaction must be the second transaction in the block
● The coinbase transaction must have 0 output value and a single empty vout
● The block timestamp must have it's bottom 4 bits set to 0 (referred to as a "mask" in
the source code). This effectively means the blocktime can only be represented in 16
second intervals, decreasing it's granularity
● The version of the block must be 7
● A block's "kernel hash" must meet the weighted difficulty for PoS
● The block hash must be signed by the public key in the staking transaction's second
vout. The signature data is placed in the block (but is not included in the formal
block hash)
● The signature stored in the block must be "LowS", which means consisting only of a
single piece of data and must be as compressed as possible (no extra leading 0s in
the data, or other opcodes)
Some Key features/characteristics of Hydra

● A true Proof-of-Stake consensus that enables every single user to stake without any
requirement for a minimum amount of coins
● An average output of 75 - 85 TPS with an elastic burst scalability of up to 540 TPS
● One-click installers for running a node on an average household computer (after
you install the node, you will be able to stake your coins)
● Ethereum VM support in order to have full compatibility and easy migration of
Ethereum DAPPS and Ethereum smart contracts
● Coin owners are able to stake their coins to get a piece of the transactional economy
from the LockTrip booking app as well as from all other DAPPS and tokens
● Revenue from the transactional economy shared with the ERC20, ERC223, ERC721
smart contracts – they will be accredited on a protocol level with 50% of the fees
they are able to generate through their transactions. This technically means that
Hydra is the first blockchain, which utilizes a true shared economy that sustainably
incentivizes dAPP developers. The people who contribute to its adoption will benefit
from the transactions they generate, regardless of their business model. A unique
opportunity for Defi due to the enormous amount of transaction gas consummation
and high transaction count.
● Easy installation of nodes for average users

Github Repository: [Link]

6. Coin Distribution Event

Since Hydra chain has been financed and developed by the LockTrip team and community, the
distribution of the HYDRA coins will happen to LOC holders proportionally to the amount
they hold, over a gradual 12-month process. The launch of the blockchain is planned in three
stages, of which each is described briefly below.

Distribution Mechanics
Originally in 2018 Hydra was designed as a component of LockTrip (LOC), which was later
decided to be unpegged and separated as a standalone project. This essentially means HYDRA
is a blockchain that was developed by a team that had a unique practical usage perspective as
a DaPP developer first. A perspective that has put the focus on critical economic limitations of
existing chains and made it possible for next-generation block economy to be iterated.

The decision came through a community vote. The LockTrip community evaluated HYDRA as
an extraordinary project with unique economic and technical capabilities and far too big
potential that deserved to be unpegged and put on its own independent trail.

In this context, Hydra Chain has been financed and developed by the LockTrip team and
community, the distribution of the HYDRA coins will initially happen to LOC holders
proportionally to the amount they hold, over a gradual 12-month process with multiple
mechanisms in place to protect against speculation. The launch of the blockchain is planned
in three stages, of which each is described briefly below.

Stage 1 - Cold Launch (Oct 2020 - Dec 2020)

Initiates with the launch of mainnet. The blockchain will initially be supported with core
nodes and thus will start off as a decentralized and permissionless network, which due to the
consolidated amount of HYDRA, will be characterized with relatively centralized staking
power. This will be for a period of 3 months. During this time period, the external
infrastructure will be set in place, such as exchange integrations, wallet integrations.

In order to support on-chain transactions, a small supply of HYDRA coins will be available on
exchanges for purchase immediately after the main-net has been launched.
Stage 2 - Liquidity Event (Jan 2021)
An open order book liquidity event will be held to offer 150,000 HYDRA to exchanges. The
purpose of the event is to

● Establish the market-driven price of HYDRA

● Provide access to HYDRA for GAS purposes
● Allow users to get an idea of how staking works with HYDRA

Stage 3 - Airdrop to Community (March 20201 - Feb 2022)

Stage 3 represents the main phase in terms of HYDRA coin distribution and gearing up the
transactional activity on-chain. Over a period of 50 weeks, HYDRA coins will be airdropped to
LOC holders on a weekly basis (2% per week), with a new snapshot being made each week.

For example, a user owning 10,000 LOC tokens at the time of the weekly snapshot, will receive
10,000 HYDRA x 0.02 = 200 HYDRA for that particular week. And the process will be repeated
until 100% of HYDRA’s total 18,585,933 supply is distributed entirely.

The start of the Airdrop is scheduled to begin in the second half of March 2021.

In order to incentivize HYDRA coin owners to stake their coins, the inflation during this
period of transition will naturally be higher due to the overall lower network weight
(described in Staking Income). The staking power of the community will grow gradually as the
airdrop progresses and the staking weight of the company nodes will be reduced to allow for
the community to slowly take over.

The transition towards complete decentralization will happen during this stage.

The airdrop will ensure the HYDRA genesis originates with the community that created it

Stage 4- Full Operation

The final stage marks the completion of the migration process. With the airdrop of HYDRA
coins being finalized, both the transactional economy as well as the staking weight of
community nodes will reach its natural trajectory.