In a new interview with Cheddar, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson says the crypto industry is searching for its “Wifi or bluetooth moment.”
“We haven’t quite gotten there yet. The consumer has gotten used to this idea that when they pull out their phone, if they’re in Korea or Japan or South Africa or here in America, that their phone will just connect to the Wifi network. But there’s no reason that should be true. That was only due to the hard work of an entire industry.”
Hoskinson says his team is working on a collection of standards that will inevitably converge over the next three to five years, allowing users to move information and value between all these different systems.
“Not just Bitcoin to Litecoin to Ethereum to Cardano – but also your regular bank account, your Chase account or your Wells Fargo account or your credit card. Somehow you can move seamlessly between these different systems and do cross-border settlements.
So that’ll happen. We’re part of that conversation. Part of it is innovation and part of it is pragmatism. Sometimes the best standard doesn’t win, so you as a builder have to be willing to integrate that into your system – whatever ends up happening.”
When asked to comment on the competition that’s been heating up among several leading blockchain networks, such as Ethereum and Tron, whose founders Vitalik Buterin and Justin Sun have engaged in public Twitter spats, Hoskinson says he and his colleagues are creating infrastructure.
“Yeah, Justin’s a special guy. We actually had dinner in Hong Kong. He’s a nice guy, he’s a good guy.”
“Just like the trains and the planes and the roads you drive on and the power plants we build, these things are going to be around, ultimately for a very long time. So it’s not about who’s first to market or how quickly can we upgrade something. It’s about what’s fit for purpose. And not fit for purpose for just a few thousand people but for seven billion people.
So we have a very global view in the way we do things. We have offices in Africa in Addis Ababa. I was just recently in Ethiopia, and we think about how do we get this to work for the coffee farmer who doesn’t have an internet connection, and he has intermittent power, all the way to how do we get this to work for Wall Street. And we have a collection of solutions that we’ve built out in the university setting at places like Tokyo Tech and University of Edinburgh and that we’ve then validated with formal methods and code so that we feel that what we’ve constructed will work for the long term, something for the next 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, because we eventually have to live with these decisions, for better or for worse.”