Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum white paper’s author and Ethereum blockchain creator and developer, recently discussed Cardano – which runs ADA on its platform – during the conversation with Lex Fridman, an MIT AI researcher.
The Russian-Canadian programmer’s comments about the Cardano platform were made during the 188th episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast. Vitalik Buterin said that there were ‘interesting ideas’ appearing due to work done on the rival smart contract platform Cardano by the IOHK company – run by Charles Hoskinson, former Ethereum member and co-founder.
As reported by The Daily Hold, Buterin said: “There’s definitely interesting ideas in there. I do think Cardano takes a bit of a different approach than Ethereum in that they really emphasize having these big academic proofs for everything, whereas Ethereum tends to be more okay with heuristic arguments. In part because [Ethereum is] just trying to do more faster. But there are definitely very interesting things that come out of IOHK Research.”
Cardano’s Approach to Protocol Software Development
While praising Hoskinson’s and IOHK’s ideas regarding the development of Cardano, Buterin also mentioned the aggressive approach the company used to protocol software development, which – in his eyes – isn’t ideal because it focuses more on tackling issues within the protocol instead of paying attention to external risks.
“I’m actually the sort of person who thinks deep rigor is overrated,” he said. “The reason why I think deep rigor is overrated is because I think like in terms of like why protocols fail. I think the number of failures that are outside the model is bigger and more important than the failures that are inside the model.”
He continued: “And then the other thing is that a lot of the academic approach ends up basically optimizing for other people inside of the academic system. And it doesn’t really optimize for like curious outsiders.”
