Hydra Head, a scaling tool for making Cardano blockchain transactions even faster, is now live on the mainnet, the developers announced Thursday. The tool is the first in a series of items. Each Hydra Head functions as an off-chain “mini ledger” shared by a small group of participants, speeding up transactions while dramatically cutting fees. According to the technical documentation, developers can use Hydra Heads to implement specialised, sophisticated decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols on top of Cardano. The introduction of the node is the latest in a series of DeFi-focused Cardano updates this year. Cardano-based decentralised stablecoin djed was launched in January, and Cardano developer IOG offered a means to improve cross-chain transactions in February.