Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of IOHK, the research company behind the Cardano blockchain, says the not-for-profit nature of Ethereum is the reason why most of its founders left.
In an interview with CoinMarketCap, Hoskinson says the decision to make Ethereum a not-for-profit organization is counterintuitive.
“With Ethereum, the choice of a for-profit versus a not-for-profit — it’s brain dead obvious that most people would pick a for-profit.”
“It gives you more freedom for your business execution. Second, if you create a lot of value, you own that value, where the not-for-profit, you’re walking away from that value.”
Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, Amir Chetrit, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilke. While Buterin remains active in the Ethereum community, the other seven founders eventually left and built their own companies.
Hoskinson says there is no incentive for anyone to stay with a not-for-profit, and this is what happened with Ethereum.
“Some of these companies aren’t even in the Ethereum space. For example, Parity Tech [co-founded by Gavin Wood] is building a competing product, and ConsenSys may even start pivoting, and obviously I’m not doing work on Ethereum.”
As for the crypto market as a whole, Hoskinson says it was disappointing to watch Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency prices fall on March 12th along with traditional assets, but the scenario showed the strength of the industry’s retail investors.
“I was encouraged to see that the investor under the $100,000 price point was much more resilient than the investor above the $100,000 price point. If you’re an investor above $100,000, you’re institutional or a big guy, you go look at trends and you say, ‘Oh, everything’s free falling. Just go to cash, hold it, and then we’ll reinvest after we get a better sense.'”
Featured Image: Shutterstock/FlashMovie