Recently, Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO of IO Global (aka “IOG”, formerly known as “IOHK”), the company responsible for Cardano ($ADA) research and development, explained what he admires about Ethereum and its ecosystem.
Hoskinson, who is also one of the original co-founders of Ethereum Foundation (as well as its first CEO), made these comments during a “Surprise AMA” that was streamed live on his YouTube channel on Tuesday (February 22).
The last question in this AMA session was if there were any ways in which Ethereum is better than Cardano.
Hoskinson replied with a two-part answer.
In the first part of his reply, Hoskinson talked about what he liked about Ethereum, the Ethereum ecosystem, and Vitalik Buterin’s leadership:
“Well, Ethereum in its current instantiation is a subset of Cardano. When sidechains come, everything Ethereum is, Cardano is. They’re combined together. It’s like the real numbers to the integers: there’s a lot more of them and they do a lot more things, but the integers are contained within the real numbers.
“Okay, so from a technological viewpoint, layer one, I’m not so worried about it. The layer two ecosystem is fascinating. Rollups, in particular, there’s a lot of magic there, and I admire that greatly, and I think we can do better as an ecosystem, and there’s $150,000 of funding from Catalyst to chase that.
“There are some ventures that are chasing that, and we are researching roll-ups for the Hydra tail protocol in particular. So, I think a lot can be done be above and beyond what we’re doing, and the Ethereum space is doing interesting things there, and they’re really impressive things that are happening.
“There is an interesting thing about community building, you know, if you’re intellectually honest. Ethereum has a humongous community. I personally sometimes have some issues with that community above and beyond their distaste for me. I think there’s a lot of elitism and arrogance in it and samrminess in it, and it’s the ‘man bun syndrome’.
“Yes, that’s a personal taste and preference, but it’s undeniable the pervasiveness of Ethereum. It’s undeniable that those people are also quite effective. There is a problem-solving mindset that exists within Ethereum that is seldom seen in the rest of the cryptocurrency space, where people don’t just bitch and complain about things or go to some sort of ideological religion.
“They actually try to solve stuff, and I think it’s a testimony to good leadership from Vitalik. He’s a very solutions-oriented person, and he’s a very execution-oriented person. Well, there’s depth and philosophy there. There’s always an engineering mindset of ‘build it, build it, build it, build it’. And there’s a persistence there that is quite impressive, and I admire that.
“And at times, I think it, we could be as an ecosystem a bit too academic, whereas the other extreme, the pendulum goes all the way over. And they’re very engineering-focused, academic second, although we’re both kind of meeting in the middle as projects.
“I think the other thing that Etheruem has done very well — they’ve been a very effective communicator as an ecosystem about blockchain utility that’s non-monetary. Before Ethereum, the name of the game was Bitcoin, altcoin token, token somehow connected to finance and not a lot of diversity. And then, there was ideas about extending financial capabilities, Colored coins, Mastercoin…
“But Ethereum came around, and suddenly you have NFTs, and suddenly we have all these other things — oracles and video games, and all kinds of weird experience like metaverse stuff. It’s pretty cool, and Ethereum was the first mover in that, and there’s still a lot of strength and momentum in that community about dreaming big. You know, building big, doing things a little differently, and there’s an amazing renewal year after year that is enduring, and a culture that doesn’t take itself so seriously… There’s a culture there for better for worse, and it’s very different from the Cardano…“
In the second part of his reply, though, Hoskinson talked about what he disliked about the Ethereum “movement”, namely its “arrogance” and lack of interest in learning about successes and failures of other major crypto projects such as Cardano, Solana, and IOTA:
“The Achilles heel of the Ethereum movement, though, is their inability as a movement in my view to understand where they have blind spots, or cognitive, biases, or unfair thoughts… Not a lot of people, rank and file in Ethereum land, will acknowledge that Cardano has done legitimately interesting things…
“There’s so much magic in what we’ve done, so much careful thought, so many thousands of conversations, so many thousands of meetings, and countless hours writing code and doing science and building things that go into who we are, what we’ve done, and that’s all in the open for everybody in the space — for better or for worse — to utilize.
“You can’t with a project that has committed so much work to paper just offhand dismiss it because of your personal distaste for the founder and the fact that an entire ecosystem, in some way, has succumbed to that, that doesn’t vote very well for their future because that’s ultimately to their detriment.
“If you’re smart, you learn from other people’s mistakes. You learn from where other people have not done things well or done things well. Competitive analysis intelligence really helps you out. You see this in great engineering. Bio-mimicry is a great example of that. For any structure, any design, anything you look at, you always ask ‘did nature already do it?’ because if it did, I have a starting point… Who am I to argue with millions of years of evolution?
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