The Cardano founder argues that Ethereum’s fundamental design flaws and centralization will ultimately cause its collapse.
Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, stated on Wednesday that Ethereum, the blockchain he co-founded, will likely become obsolete in the next 10 to 15 years.
Ethereum, with a market capitalization exceeding $212 billion, holds the position of the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. At the time of writing, its native token, ETH, is priced around $1,760, while Cardano’s ADA token is valued at about $0.73, with a market cap just under $27 billion, according to CoinGecko.
In a YouTube video, Hoskinson asserts that Ethereum has made three significant mistakes that will cause it to become obsolete within the next decade. He compares Ethereum’s path to that of Myspace and Blackberry, labeling it a “victim of its own success.”
“First and foremost, they have the wrong accounting model, the wrong virtual machine, and the wrong consensus model,” Hoskinson explains.
Hoskinson argues that these decisions were “self-inflicted wounds” that experts had warned against. “To solve these issues, they introduced complex slashing economics and Layer 2 solutions, and now they’re dealing with the consequences,” he added.
The third problem, he claims, is Ethereum’s absence of a strong on-chain governance system.
“What needs to happen is addressing all three issues simultaneously,” he stated. “First, the technological problem must be solved—the current proof-of-stake protocol is flawed, and they need to gradually transition away from it.”
Hoskinson highlighted Sui’s object model as a model worth following. Unlike blockchains that depend on accounts with key-value stores, Sui’s model focuses on objects as the core units of storage, according to its documentation.
Unsurprisingly, Hoskinson praised Cardano’s approach, stating, “We carefully designed a Layer 2 ecosystem for Cardano that’s not parasitic but symbiotic—that’s what Midnight is achieving with Cardano… We have the right accounting model, the right consensus model, and the right virtual machine model.”
Hoskinson wrapped up his critique by backing Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s suggestion to transition to the RISC-V architecture, a model that Cardano has already adopted.
“I think transitioning to RISC-V is a great move. It’s a smart decision for Vitalik,” Hoskinson said. “But the accounting model also needs to be reworked.”
As Buterin suggested, RISC-V would replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the environment where Ethereum smart contracts are run.
Buterin stated that adopting RISC-V would “significantly enhance the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, addressing one of the main scaling bottlenecks, while also simplifying the execution layer.”
