Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson accused Ethereum (ETH) of quietly adopting Cardano’s EUTXO logic after a new research design proposed native UTXO-style payments.
Key Points:
- Hoskinson said Ethereum is trying to copy Cardano’s EUTXO model without naming it.
- The post proposes one-shot payment objects to reduce Ethereum state growth.
- Any protocol change would need review and a hard fork.
Ethereum UTXO Plan
Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter published a design this week that treats simple payments as temporary, one-shot objects rather than permanent account-state entries.
On Ethereum today, the first payment to any address creates a permanent state record, even when the transfer does not need ongoing account data. The proposal would prove a payment’s existence from history and leave only one spent marker in state.
Bitcoin (BTC) introduced that one-shot structure through its UTXO model, where each output is created once, spent once and then leaves the active memory set.
Wahrstätter said the approach could cut permanent state for payment workloads by about 99.8%, because a fresh account entry uses roughly 100 to 150 bytes, while a native UTXO would leave about 0.3 bytes. The proposal builds on Frame Transactions, EIP-8141, and Wahrstätter credited Vitalik Buterin with raising the topic.
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Cardano Copying Claim
Hoskinson answered with an accusation, saying Ethereum developers were copying the Extended Unspent Transaction Output design that underpins Cardano smart contracts while avoiding any public credit.
“EUTXO is the biggest innovation of the smart contract world and Ethereum cannot mention it as they literally try to copy it,” Hoskinson wrote on X. He added that mentioning Cardano is “literally a crime” inside Ethereum circles and pointed to Cardano’s past position as the third-largest asset on CoinMarketCap.
Markets did not show a strong reaction. ADA traded near $0.17 after a 12.5% weekly gain, while Ethereum changed hands near $1,754 with a market capitalization of $211 billion and kept its second-place ranking.
The Ethereum design has not become a formal EIP yet. A change of that scale would still need community review and a hard fork, so the argument is likely to stay theoretical unless developers move the idea into the upgrade process.
Hoskinson’s complaint fits a longer rivalry between the two ecosystems, and it also reflects Cardano’s effort to keep EUTXO central to its identity. Cardano’s recent Leios scaling push has kept that design in focus, even as parts of its community have criticized Hoskinson’s leadership.
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