The crypto markets may be reacting favorably to the sudden change in bullish sentiment by investors, but coin projects are still feuding to offer the best product.
Cardano (ADA) Founder and Inside Outside Hong Kong (IOHK) CEO Charles Hoskinson shared his opinion on the future of cryptocurrency, and gave a critical take on Ethereum and EOS in an interview with Fortune published on April 9. Hoskinson, who was an original co-founder of Ethereum before departing from the project, told his interviewers that the strength of cryptocurrency moving forward will be through defining itself as a decentralized industry–one that necessitates ‘leaderless-ness.’
As opposed to striving for the hallmark of decentralization, Hoskinson sees other industry projects as promoting a top-down approach, establishing figures that are similar to a “president or king or committee or group that we’ve endowed with special powers.” Truly decentralized cryptocurrencies should operate as a “cooperative or as a bottom-up community.” Delving into his opinion on the current state of decentralization and how it can be exacerbated further in the coming years, Hoskinson said
“We really do have a governance problem.”
Hoskinson believes that the establishment of decentralization and building businesses and system that operate outside of the traditional CEO/leadership-drive paradigm will be a primary challenge for both the world and cryptocurrency over the coming century,
“This is the first time ever where we’re flirting with the idea of a corporation without a CEO or a country without a president. That is a very big challenge and it’s something I think will consume the majority of the 21st century for the cryptocurrency space.”
Hoskinson also took the opportunity to criticize Ethereum and EOS project leads, despite having close ties to the former. Hoskinson, who helped found Ethereum before departing from the project in 2014 following a disagreement, turned his attention at the time to supporting Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Now, he finds fault in Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and EOS’s Dan Larimer, for promoting a “lone samurai viewpoint,” which also ties back to his earlier opinion on decentralization. As opposed to being a community, bottom-up driven style of development, Hoskinson believes coin projects like Ethereum and EOS promote the idea of a small group of developers tackling the industry and its problems alone–a route that Cardano’s founder finds unrealistic.
Hoskinson explained his “lone samurai” viewpoint to Fortune,
“one brilliant founder, whether it be Dan [Larimer, cofounder of the EOS blockchain project] or Vitalik will lead a small group of crack engineers to somehow innovate and solve a big problem. Nothing gets done that way.”
However, Hoskinson framed his comments in the broader goal of establishing collaboration between cryptocurrency projects, and defined it as a key to industry success. He again reiterated his position on interoperability–allowing cryptocurrencies and networks to operate seamlessly–as being a primary goal to strive for, calling interoperability the “Bluetooth or Wi-Fi moment” for crypto.
As to his opinion on whether interoperability could become a reality for crypto, Hoskinson said,
“We’re not going to get there in the financial industry unless we have good standards to move value and information between all these different ledgers.”
