Since the Cardano blockchain evolved into a decentralised smart-contract platform in 2021, the development team led by Charles Hoskinson 2022 has been working on the scalability and expansion of the Cardano network as part of the Basho phase.

Due to the new smart contracts on the Plutus platform, the Cardano network reached over 90%, the highest network utilisation to date. With the Hydra feature, Cardano could process several million transactions per second in the future.