Cardano To Kickoff 2022 Perfecting DApps With A Host Of Paramount Developments, According To Charles Hoskinson

Key Takeaways

• CEO of IOG, Charles Hoskinson reveals Cardano is dedicating the next 6 to 9 months to perfect DApps.
• He touted Cardano’s eUTXO model as the best smart contracts framework for security and functionality.

Cardano is going to spend the next six to 9 months of 2022 perfecting its decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem according to Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of the blockchain’s development arm, Input-Output Global (IOG).

Hoskinson revealed this in his first educational podcast for the new year, a Whiteboard video on DApps and Development. The podcast set out to highlight the advantages of Cardano’s DApp development model over others such as Ethereum.

The question of the sweet spot for DApps expressiveness

A key subject of the podcast was the design considerations that went into building Cardano’s extended UTXO (eUTXO) model as opposed to Bitcoin’s UTXO model and Ethereum’s accounts-based model.

Hoskinson highlighted that the major difference in these models was their expressiveness, a computer science term that is used to describe the breadth of ideas that can be represented and communicated in a programming language. In the field, the more expensive a language is, the greater the variety and quantity of ideas it can be used to represent.

For Hoskinson, the expressiveness of programming languages in the blockchain industry can be considered to be a spectrum. Bitcoin, the foundational model of the industry, is at the lowest end of this spectrum with its highly secure but very restrictive UTXO model that utilizes a functional approach to writing smart contracts. On the higher end of the spectrum is the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that allows virtually any kind of programming to be done on it, but is also very vulnerable to attack.

Hoskinson, in his analogy, goes on to state that Ethereum’s EVM is somewhere around the 80 percent mark of this spectrum as it has some restrictions to boost security, but not enough as it was still open to attacks. However, Cardano was implemented to stand somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, or what Hoskinson refers to as the sweet spot, where the things being done on both the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains can be done without being too restrictive or sacrificing security.

“One of the first parts of the research agenda when we were looking at taking the UTXO model, because we really liked this functionality idea…, we said well let’s make it a bit more extensible and so we wrote the extended UTXO model. And really, we think that for a large class of applications, the sweet spot will be somewhere in the middle.” 

DApps so far on Cardano

Hoskinson’s analysis is coming at a time when DApps are all the buzz in the Cardano community. Since the launch of the Alonzo hard fork that brought smart contract capabilities to the world’s biggest proof-of-stake blockchain network, Cardano, the community has been expecting the launch of various DApps that are under development. 

Entering January, anticipation is especially high as several DApps are expected to launch in the coming weeks. The anticipation has however not been reflected in the price of ADA, the native token of the network. ADA is trading at around $1.36, down 10.9% in the week.