In a new interview with Fortune, Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano, co-creator of Ethereum and founder of IOHK, a development company for cryptocurrencies and enterprise blockchain technologies, talks about the evolution of crypto and how it can uplift billions of people.
Hoskinson says the goal of the Cardano ecosystem is to apply the technology to solve very difficult, real-world challenges by applying it to “the most hostile places that you can imagine – the developing world.”
“We often say that Cardano is the financial operating system for the countries that don’t have one. We really want to be the entity that solves the remittance problem. And we really want to be the protocol that solves the micro-finance problem, and get those loans down from 35% interest to 5% interest. We’d really like to be able to find a way to extend these cryptocurrency protocols into environments that basically are off-line. How do you use a cryptocurrency if you don’t have access to the internet? How do you use a cryptocurrency if you only have a sporadic ability to recharge your phone or your laptop?
These are the kinds of problems and domains that we really want to push this third-generation technology towards, so that we can get those other three billion people who are unbanked back into the financial system and prosper just like the rest of us.”
Hoskinson praises Bitcoin and Ethereum for building and popularizing decentralized systems, but says the systems get too clogged.
“You really have to think outside of the box and develop fundamentally different protocols that allow you to scale.”
In addition to scalability, he and his team are focusing on how to turn the spending, sending and storing of different cryptocurrencies on a variety of devices into a great, seamless user experience.
“How are we going to have our bluetooth of Wi-fi moment for our space? It would be a really terrible thing if every time you bought a headset it would only work with one particular device. Or over time, you went to a hotel, it would only connect to certain phones.”
With standards in place to move value and information between Bitcoin and Ethereum and among all the different ledgers, Hoskinson’s sees the potential to move the financial industry to the next level of innovation.
But the methods people will use to evolve these systems, he believes, are going to be new. There won’t be a president or even a group of leaders to guide us.
“This is the first time ever where we’re flirting with the idea of a corporation without a CEO, a country without a president. That’s a very big challenge and it’s something that I think will consume the majority of the 21st century for the cryptocurrency space.”