Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, an open-source blockchain and decentralized cryptocurrency project, says the project represents a generational leap in technology compared to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
In a new Altcoin Buzz interview with Layah Heilpern, the founder of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) describes the main value proposition of Bitcoin when it was first invented.
“With Bitcoin, this was the first mover. This was the first-generation. Really it was the concept of can you have decentralized money, decentralized transfer value, decentralized ledger and somehow, someway, a dynamic and decentralized network will maintain that.
This was not the case before Bitcoin. No one had ever pulled anything like this off…
The problem with Bitcoin is that it’s very simplistic in what it can do. It’s not a criticism. It was a design feature that the architects of that system we’re trying to push.”
Hoskinson says that Bitcoin’s limitation of simply pushing value gave birth to Ethereum.
“[With Bitcoin], you can’t issue assets. You can’t do a complex contractual relationship. You can’t do DApps and DeFi and all of these things.
So the point of Ethereum, which was the first second-generation cryptocurrency, was to try to understand what that model looked like. So it took everything from the prior generation – the decentralized ledger, the dynamic and decentralized control. But then it said ‘hey now all of a sudden your transactions are programmable’.”
While Ethereum’s programmability opened many doors, Hoskinson says the second-largest cryptocurrency is limited by its inability to scale and share data with traditional systems.
“It’s not good enough to just say ‘hey we’re gonna build a system that’s blind and deaf and it doesn’t really understand or see the world around it’. We need to build a system that’s aware that there are other systems and can communicate with them and move value and information.”
Hoskinson says that the limitations he sees in both Bitcoin and Ethereum led to the creation of Cardano.
“So when you bundle these three things together – interoperability, scalability, and sustainability – that functionally creates what we call a third-generation cryptocurrency.
Now to do this, we’ve had to embrace a very different way of designing things. We went back to first principles so we assumed nothing… We basically, slowly but surely, built up a corpus of capabilities whether it be consensus capabilities, or ledger capabilities and programmability, or voting systems and governance capabilities. When you string them all together that’s basically what Cardano is.”
You can check out the full interview below.