Can a wordpress installation act as a hydra head?

[NilsDannemann]

A while ago I was working with the CardanoPress Wordpress plugin and was impressed by how easy it now is to "build something on cardano" without coding knowledge. Everybody can do that and support real world adoption. Small businesses, hobby projects, sport clubs and local communities. Great!

For a while I entertained the idea that it would be cool to turn a Wordpress Installation into a stake-pool. This turned out to be not feasible / not a good idea. The requirements alone are too high.

But after watching the hydra-tallk at IO Scotfest (starts at 5:42:00):
Can a wordpress installation act as a hydra head?
Would that even benefit cardano / make sense for cardano?

Each wordpress-instance / website usually creates it's own little cosmos around it's offers & services and is thus (somewhat) similar to the mentioned poker game.

I'm extremely new to how hydra operates and is intended to work, so this might be complete nonsense. But the ability to just spin up a wordpress website and "activate" it as a hydra head sounds cool (if it would actually benefit cardano).

Any thoughts?

[ltouro]

Hydra Head depends on a connected Cardano full node, which maybe will not help that use case very much. In the future we may see API providers for managed Heads but until there, infrastructure would be only more complex.

I think about Hydra in terms of possible saving transaction fees or being much faster but requiring to transact with a small set of participants (2 ~ 10) for some relevant period of time. Mind that creating, joining and exiting a Head has its own overhead (in time and fees). It will require additional tooling to manage these workflows. It is even more complex than building in the L1.

Digressing a little bit, if you can afford the L1 speed and fees for now, than maybe 'Light Clients' would be much more useful and impactful in these scenarios, as they would allow users and builders to run a much smaller node, without loosing any blockchain desired properties (like for instance, depending on 3rd-party API providers like Blockfrost). Mithril project (https://github.com/input-output-hk/mithril) will get us there. So for instance, spinning a Wordpress site along with an enabled and first-class blockchain ledger would be very much attainable.

[ch1bo]

What is the use case you are looking for?

Quick screen of CardanoPress yields that it seems to be an integration of browser wallets with a wordpress site. Not specific to any use case.

Whether Hydra makes sense is really depending on the use case. Some questions you could ask yourself to find out where Cardano/Hydra would come into play: Which user actions are creating transactions? How often? How much information do they (the application) need for that?

[NilsDannemann]

Right now the plugin connects wallets (next to some other stuff) but a solution for making payments to the website owner and/or between connected wallets is a possible route that the team might explore.

Thinking about bigger websites (e.g. 100K users per month) that use this:
This might be a usecase where a hydra head can become useful?

I was also wondering if each installation could basically offer the whole cardano network to act as a hydra head if needed. But I think I dont understand hydra well enough, so this might not be in line with how it's supposed to behave.

[ch1bo]

I see. It would make for a nice entry point I suppose.

The plugin could provide a way to interact with a Hydra Head, that is operated by the wordpress instance owner and other parties (if its only one operator, its centralized and you would not need a blockchain in the first place). Hydra Heads are not as decentralized as the Cardano L1, but provide in turn better UX in terms of transaction fees and speed.