Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson is looking at the protocol’s longevity and whether it can compete with a series of planned upgrades to the smart contract leader, Ethereum.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Hoskinson is asked whether ETH 2.0 has the potential to dampen enthusiasm for and adoption of Cardano.
According to Hoskinson, who heads Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the company building Cardano, there is little chance ETH 2.0 is essentially a Cardano killer.
“We were always the mantra of scalability, interoperability and sustainability. So yeah, sure, proof-of-stake is great. And we’re leading that fight. We were first to market with proof-of-stake over Ethereum…
But that’s just saying we have a better engine. An engine doesn’t make a BMW a BMW. It’s a part of it, but you need the whole ecosystem.”
Specifically, Hoskinson says Cardano’s system of governance, interoperability and ability to scale will remain more advanced than Ethereum, even after major aspects of ETH 2.0 are live.
“You need the whole collection of things. And one of the big things that ETH 2.0 has bowed out on is governance. It’s not clear how you evolve and abate the system after the founders retire or lose prominence. And the bigger these systems get, the slower they evolve…
They don’t have an obvious on-chain governance system, and that’s not in the roadmap for ETH 2.0, whereas it’s a core part of our roadmap. The second part is interoperability. So protocols like Cosmos, Polkadot and others, we make special permissions for sidechains. Ethereum really doesn’t do this well in its current instantiation in a cost-effective way. ETH 2.0, they kind of have an idea with it, but it’s still not clear how that model is going to work, especially when you have interplay with permissioned and permissionless systems.
So they’re very different when you look under the hood. Even if they were the same, there’s different user bases. We’re bringing in millions of people in Africa… So we have different technologies. We have different philosophies. We have different userbases and different time horizons.”
Hoskinson says he’s looking for Cardano to be a leader in micropayments and identity, citing a partnership designed to bring blockchain-based IDs to millions of students in Ethiopia.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, who worked on ETH alongside Charles Hoskinson, is also outlining the differences between the two platforms.
You can check out his perspective here.
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