Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK and Co-founder of Ethereum, spoke about Cardano’s progress since IOHK released ‘Cardano whiteboard and overview with Charles Hoskinson’ video in October 2017, in an interview with Ivan on Tech, on 9 April 2019.
The interview began with Hoskinson stating that the actual inception of Cardano was in 2015, when it was an “aspirational project”. He stated that the team identified three different areas that required focus in order to compete with Bitcoin and Ethereum, while also being unique. This was followed by Hoskinson stating that Bitcoin’s idea was to be decentralized money and to create a decentralized ledger. He said,
“[…] it wasn’t until 2013 that that really solidified and we reached a billion dollar market cap and people said oh cryptocurrencies are here to stay. The problem with Bitcoin is it’s blind deaf and dumb you can’t really do much with it […]”
He stated that even “minor things” such as issuing another asset was a “big, exhaustive effort”. Hoskinson added that Ethereum was created in 2013 using a concept that enabled people to implement “whatever they want on top of that” by adding a programming language to a blockchain. He went on to state,
“[…] the problem is that a definitely scale, it’s not really interoperable with all the other systems, there are over a thousand different cryptocurrencies that matter. And finally, there really is no governance notion with it, there’s no sustainability. So then, who pays and who decides […]”
Hoskinson stated that the 2017 video where he presented the roadmap and overview of Cardano laid out a “collection of ideas” that the team came up with two years earlier. He further stated,
“[…] what we did is we said alright, let’s launch a cryptocurrency, let’s build a big community in a big support base around these concepts and then let’s gradually roll the fruits of that research into that cryptocurrency […]”
He added that ever since the release of that video, Cardano has launched its first version, Byron, which got listed on more than 25 cryptocurrency exchange platforms. He added,
“[…] we’ve done five major updates to the network, we have ledger support, mobile wallets, a browser-based wallet. we have a few hundred thousand people floating around our community and we’ve now produced over 40 research papers about 20 of which of got through peer review […]”
Hoskinson further stated that Cardano was “right at the cusp” as the team would be rolling out major innovations on the Mainnet, including the Ouroboros Genesis which, according to him, “would allow to fully decentralize the network” and also be the “best-in-class” Proof-of-Stake [PoS]. He further stated that Plutus was also one of the major updates coming up for Cardano, adding the smart contract programming language to the blockchain.
