- Cardano inventor Charles Hoskinson gave his take on rivals Polkadot, Ethereum, Algorand and Tezos.
- Gavin Wood of Polkadot has done a lot of things right from the start, and is a contender given the similar goals.
In a recent interview with Stefania Barbaglio, Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano, shared his thoughts about competing crypto projects, such as Polkadot, Ethereum, Algorand, and Tezos, as well as other projects that “he likes.” The CEO of IOG gave his personal take on Gavin Wood, the creator of Polkadot, and Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum:
Polkadot is the example of what happens, in the difference between when you have an untrained genius designing something and a real veteran engineer who’s smart, so that’s the difference you have in [Gavin] Wood and Vitalik [Buterin]. Vitalik is an incredible bright guy […] but the thing is: raw intelligence and capability is useless […] you really need a master to redefine and give him discipline. After you done that he can become a Da Vinci.
Hoskinson says Polkadot and its founders have taken a more pragmatic approach and are doing very well with it. The Polkadot team hasn’t completely reinvented everything. “They are using our consensus algorithm, Ouroboros that they modified to have better properties for their ecosystem,” Hoskinson added.
We are of course rivals in certain respects […] but personal stuff aside, there’s a professional respect for the Polkadot team and what they’ve done.
In addition, Polkadot relies on a sharding mechanism that is significantly easier to implement than Ethereum’s, he said, even if it won’t be quite as powerful initially. Ultimately, Gavin Wood has been going the right way from the beginning, while Ethereum is still trying to do too much in parallel:
We wouldn’t have these massive gas fees, and it would be significantly harder for me to compete against Ethereum. But instead they have chosen to go with this incredibly complex roadmap that like a roadmap to hell, the so much stuff, there’s so many moving pieces. […] A lot of things can go wrong. […] we made the same mistake with Cardano, we tried way too much too quickly. […] that cost us q lot of years and I paid that price.
Hoskinson on Algorand, Tezos and others
Hoskinson further expressed great respect for Silvio Micali, the founder of Algorand. Micali, he said, has the luxury of being at MIT and being the “big man” there. “A lot of what we use, he helped invent”. In addition, Micali “very wisely joined a business development team and built a good development team” that “writes great code.”
However, Hoskinson believes Algorand made a critical mistake that is now preventing the project from having wider adoption and the ALGO token from having greater liquidity:
I think the only mistake they made is the token distribution. I had dinner with him [Silvio Micali] years ago, and I said: ‘Silvio, you should consider doing an airdrop to Bitcoin’, […] instead of doing a new distribution. Had he done that, I think Algorand would probably be at a 5 to 10-billion-dollar market cap minimum instead and have a lot more adoption and liquidity. It’s really hard to bootstrap a new ecosystem in this market.
Although the Cardano inventor faces “relentless” hate from the Tezos community, he appreciates the project and its ideas:
Their community hates me with a relentless passion. […] On the other hand, I always said positive things about the roadmap vision and the project. I like Ocaml, it’s a great programming language, I love what they’ve done with formal methods, I really love that there are other people that think about governance, like we do.
Hoskinson also likes the approach of IOG’s partner Ergo, a small Russian startup that “deserves to be” in the top 20 to top 30. In addition, Cosmos, Ethereum Classic, Dash and Horizen are also projects with good ideas, according to Charles Hoskinson:
I certainly know Jae Kwon and the Cosmos guys who are always saying reasonable things. We obviously work with Ethereum Classic […] I really like what Dash did. They were one of the first to do treasuries and of course we like the Horizen guys that gave us an excuse to do privacy stuff, and we learned a huge amount from that.
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