Hoskinson compares Ethereum to 96-year-old karate fighter

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Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson talked about “progress” and why Ethereum is not a serious competitor.
Ethereum’s first-mover effect is worth as much as Myspace’s original success – “nothing.”

In a new video via Twitter, Charles Hoskinson talked about “progress” while addressing the community directly. His message: Cardano (ADA) is not about the price or hype, it’s about “developing things.” “If this does not appeal to you, there are ecosystems that do that, TRON is an example and there are dozens of others,” Hoskinson said.

But as the IOG CEO also explained, successes should be celebrated, and Cardano is at a point where there is reason to celebrate:

For about three years now, we’ve been commercially running around, trying to convince nations, states, big companies, writing pilots, doing all kind of things. We are finally starting to see substantive progress in this vision. It’s always hard to get a thousand ‘no’. But when you finally get to a point where […] it can bear fruit with potentially millions, tens of millions of users […] that’s a moment to celebrate.

Ethereum is not a serious competitor to Cardano

Hoskinson also addressed Cardano’s critics, who have repeatedly accused the project and its founder in recent years of “lack of progress” and that the network effect Ethereum has earned as a first mover in the smart contract space is too big to catch up to. However, Hoskinson contradicted that:

It’s easy to do DeFi, I laugh when people say ‘How can you catch up with Ethereum’s network effect?’. It doesn’t exist. What 80,000 developers compared to 22.6 million developers? Only 31% of the new dapps deployed in 2020 were on Ethereum. It costs 50 bucks to do anything – even send a transaction. And I have to compete with that? That’s like a karate match where the other person is 96 years old and is in a wheelchair. […] It’s not a competition.

IOG CEO went on to state that Ethereum has been able to establish a “small monopoly” as a first-mover, much like Myspace has managed to do in the social media age. However, this network effect of Ethereum means as much as that of Myspace in the social media race – “nothing.”

“True progress”

What matters is the next five to 10 years. And that timeframe is when Cardano will set the stage for citizens in “Uganda or Tanzania” to be able to get a microloan peer-to-peer and not use a bank to do it. It is not the past that counts, but the adaptation in the years to come:

Will the average person who wants to send money from their home to someone else somewhere in the world use Western Union or PayPal or some service or do they you use a peer-to-peer application. […] We are on our path to destiny.

This, Hoskinson said, will bring millions of users to the network. It will not just make a few rich and add limited value to the network. At the same time, of course, this will add a lot of value to the network, as Hoskinson also pointed out:

Yeah, if you build something that billions of people use, of course it’s going to be one of the most valuable things on the planet. But the value comes from the fact that the people use it.