Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson: Cardano doesn’t need crypto to prosper

• Hoskinson is a co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Input Output Hong Kong
• Hoskinson criticized Merge and it didn’t go well with the Ethereum engineer
• The IOHK CEO put out a Twitter thread 

Hoskinson’s Merge-suggestion triggers Ethereum developers

Charles Hoskinson recently got into a ‘heated debate’ with Ethereum developers over Ethereum’s Merge on Twitter. On the 26th, Hoskinson put out a thread that was 9 tweets long. In the thread, he called out Ethereum developers for ignoring Ouroboros and treating Cardano like an enemy.

It all began with Evan Van Ness, an Ethereum tweeting ‘an unpopular opinion’ about Ethereum’s Merge. He wrote that the upgrade should have happened sooner. Vitalik Buterin replied to Van Ness’s tweet agreeing with him. He added that they should have implemented a different approach and upgraded Ethereum in 2018. Hoskinson replied to Vitalik’s tweet saying they should have used Snow White with ‘Elaine’s help in order to get the upgrade faster. Van Ness responded to that by reminding us that Ethereum fired Charles within 6 months because of his poor behavior and low technical contribution. Eventually, Hoskinson blocked Van Ness.

Hoskinson claimed that Ethereum developers ignored Ouroboros, a proof of stake protocol that distributes network control across stake pools. It is one of the first ‘peer-review’ based blockchains. He added that the custodial and non-liquidity staking was an inefficient design.

James Hudson, a core developer working for Ethereum, called out Hoskinson tweeting that Hoskinson forgot about how he despised Ethereum back on Reddit in 2018 and that Vitalik recently reviewed Ouroboros. He added that Ethereum’s developers did not like Cardano because of Hoskinson’s behavior.

In his thread, Hoskinson said that Cardano does not need Crypto to boom and neither does it need to ‘poach’ Bitcoin and Ethereum community members. He added that Cardano was focused on solving real-life problems and that he was sad that the ‘industry’ behaved like this sometimes – referring to the Ethereum devs’ perception of Cardano.

Merge and Vasil: how two similar events were viewed differently

Ethereum and Cardano had significant hard fork events. Hard fork events are essentially upgrades in the blockchain that may or may not require the deployment of a new version of the existing blockchain. While Ethereum’s Merge came out after a 5-year delay, Cardano’s Vasil upgrade was delayed by only 3 months. 

While the Merge was significantly hyped (there was a google doodle count-down for Merge) Cardano’s Vasil upgrade received much less mainstream coverage. However, the crypto MedaiVerse dogged the events throughout, and the significance of both events is well explained to the community.