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Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure In his latest ask-me-anything session streamed on April 23, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson delivered a sweeping critique of Ethereum’s long-term prospects, arguing that the world’s second-largest smart-contract platform is encumbered by what he called three “self-inflicted wounds” and lacks the on-chain governance needed to heal them. Ethereum Faces 15-Year Deadline: Cardano Founder Responding to an audience question—“If you were running the Ethereum Foundation, what would you do differently?”—Hoskinson said the project chose “the wrong accounting model, the wrong virtual machine, and the wrong consensus model,” a triad of design decisions he believes now threaten Ethereum’s survival. “People told them not to do it, they did it, and they got where they needed to go,” he said, before warning that the fixes adopted so far “put in all these weird slashing economics and layer twos and other things,” whose unintended consequences are starting to bite. Hoskinson, who co-founded Ethereum in 2014 before leaving to launch Cardano two years later, insisted that a viable turnaround would require parallel workstreams. “First off, you have to solve your technological problems,” he said, pointing to Ethereum’s proof-of-stake implementation as something the network “needs to wean itself off of.” He suggested a shift to what he called a “telescoping protocol design” such as Ouroboros-Leios—Cardano’s forthcoming upgrade path—and urged Ethereum developers to look at the “object model of SWE,” along with Narwhal-and-Tusk-style consensus, and a move to the RISC-V instruction set. “Something like RISC-V with intent, with an object model like SWE, probably would fit their ecosystem quite well,” he argued. Yet the bigger obstacle, in Hoskinson’s view, is Ethereum’s lack of formalized self-governance. “They really don’t have a good on-chain governance system,” he said. Building one, he estimates, would take “five to seven…

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Filed under: News - @ April 24, 2025 11:26 am