Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson & Ethereum Core Developers Beef It out on Twitter

Ethereum core devs and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson duke it out on Twitter following Hoskinson’s criticism of Ethereum.

While many diehard Ethereum community members celebrated the success of the recent Ethereum Merge, one former co-founder said the Merge was only needed because Ethereum was inherently flawed.

In Reddit and Twitter threads, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson opined that both Ethereum’s foundation and community were broken, and core developers completely ignored the Ouroboros protocol as a potential fix in the last five years leading up to the Merge. The Ouroboros protocol is a proof-of-stake, peer-reviewed consensus protocol that the Cardano blockchain uses.

 In response, one former member of the Ethereum Foundation, Hudson Jameson, decried Hoskinson’s alleged inability to engage tactfully with Cardano competitors like Ethereum.

“Real leaders usually have more tact when dealing with their competitors,” Jameson said. “Ethereum devs aren’t wanting to look at Cardano because of your attitude and actions as the face of Cardano,” he later tweeted.

The rivalry between Cardano and Ethereum dates back to 2014 when Hoskinson founded an online bitcoin education project, where he met Buterin and became one of Ethereum’s co-founders. Hoskinson and Buterin later clashed over diverging visions for Ethereum. Hoskinson wanted to create a for-profit blockchain ecosystem with formal governance, while Buterin favored an open-source community with the decentralized government. Hoskinson was fired from the Ethereum project within six months since, according to Web3 investor Evan Ness, he was unliked and made no meaningful technical contributions.

Hoskinson later co-founded Input Output Hong Kong to create a blockchain focusing on academic, corporate, and governmental applications, which led to Cardano’s development.

Hoskinson: It’s time to grow up

Speaking on a nine-tweet Twitter thread, Hoskinson said that it is time for people of rival blockchain communities to “grow up” and be able to candidly discuss protocol design differences instead of criticizing a project like Cardano as being “a cult beholden to an evil, sociopathic, but incompetent pathological lying founder who somehow has stumbled upon stolen success, but will be in jail any moment now when the world wakes up.”

He added that such behavior hurts the crypto industry overall.

Hoskinson has also drawn criticism for his departure from the Ethereum Classic project following the rejection of his treasury proposal to preserve the unaltered Ethereum blockchain after it was hacked in 2016.

He counters that the Ethereum Classic project is “dead,” having no team, no projects, or no reason to migrate.

Buterin admits Merge could have happened sooner

With the Ethereum Merge completed, Van Ness admits that the Ethereum Merge could have been shipped sooner. Buterin agreed, saying that the Merge should have implemented a chain-based proof-of-stake protocol and released the Merge in 2018. A chain-based proof-of-stake protocol uses an algorithm to decide who can add transaction blocks to the blockchain.

At the same time, Cardano deployed its Vasil hard fork on Sep. 22, 2022, roughly a week after the Ethereum Merge, following the announcement of an ambitious 2022 roadmap in Jan. 2022. According to Hoskinson, the hard fork will spur the growth of decentralized applications on the Cardano ecosystem through improvements to the Plutus scripting language. Hoskinson believes Cardano can succeed and grow without taking users away from Ethereum and bitcoin.

“Mass adoption hasn’t happened yet, and we can grow to billions of users without poaching a single one from Bitcoin or Ethereum. We just need to be good at solving real-life problems, and that’s been the focus of our community. I’m proud of them, and it’s remarkable to see how much progress we’ve all made,” Hoskinson concluded.

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