Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has launched a scathing critique of Ethereum's governance model. He claims the network operates like a "dictatorship" under the outsized influence of co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Hoskinson made these scandalous remarks during an interview in Singapore. He argued that Ethereum's development relies too heavily on Buterin's direction.
"Everybody looks to him for the roadmap," Hoskinson said. "Everybody looks to him for inspiration, and he's also the only person who has enough power to rally people."
The Cardano founder questioned Ethereum's ability to make decisions without Buterin. He pointed to recent shifts in Ethereum's scalability strategy as evidence of Buterin's influence and highlighted Ethereum's move away from sharding-based optimization. The network now focuses on rollups and layer-2 networks for scalability.
"Where does this idea of embracing layer 2s come from, or rollups come from?" Hoskinson asked. "Was it some random Ethereum engineer — or was it Vitalik Buterin writing a blog post about it, talking about it, and advocating for it?"
As one could expect, Hoskinson contrasted Ethereum's approach with Cardano's new governance model. He claims it solves the "governance trilemma" of efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity.
Cardano's recent Chang hard fork transformed ADA into a governance token, which allows holders to elect representatives and vote on development proposals.
"If you have those three things, then you have a fair shot of avoiding the anarchy of Bitcoin or the dictatorship of Ethereum," Hoskinson stated. "You actually have something that can move forward with one voice, but it's still decentralized at the end of the day because it represents everybody."
Hoskinson acknowledged his own influential role in Cardano's development since 2015. However, he insists the new governance model ensures the network's continued innovation, with or without his involvement. The Cardano founder was previously involved with Ethereum. He served as one of eight original co-founders and CEO before departing in 2014 due to disagreements over the project's direction.
He obviously sees things in a dark way till now. Although Hoskinson believes Ethereum is heavily influenced by Buterin’s vision, most of Ethereum fans would disagree.
According to CoinTelegraph's Tom Mitchelhill, Buterin does not wield unilateral power in the decentralized network. The blockchain uses a mix of offchain and onchain governance that includes the Ethereum Foundation and community and stakeholder input into Ethereum Improvement Protocols. The most critical decisions are taken at core developer meetings. Contentious decisions can result in a hard fork, such as The DAO hack rollback that resulted in Ethereum Classic.