Charles Hoskinson Labels Ethereum a ‘Dictatorship,’ Criticizes Vitalik Buterin’s Influence

• Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson labels Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin as a dictator who appears at the center of roadmaps and direction of the project. 

• Hoskinson believes that the newly introduced Cardano governance model would ensure that the project continues even in his absence. 

Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson launched a subtle attack on Ethereum in his recent presentation at the Token2049 event in Singapore. According to him, Ethereum’s governance model heavily depends on co-founder Vitalik Buterin for direction, underscoring its “dictatorship nature.” 

Throwing another dig at Buterin, Hoskinson stressed that the entire roadmap of Ethereum is within the control of the co-founder. This implies that the project would be vague and visionless when the 30-year-old is moved from the “equation.”

Everybody looks to him for the roadmap. Everybody looks to him for inspiration, and he’s also the only person who has enough power to rally people. If you were to remove him from the equation right now, what’s the next hard fork going to look like, and how quickly can they actually get there?

Comparing this to his project, Hoskinson pointed out that Cardano’s new model provides a lasting solution to the “governance trilemma” of “efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity.” According to him, this was done through the use of delegated representatives and an organization called Intersect. To him, this has the power to prevent the “dictatorship of Ethereum” and the “anarchy of Bitcoin.”

If you have those three things, then you have a fair shot of avoiding the anarchy of Bitcoin or the dictatorship of Ethereum, and 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’s Past Involvement with Ethereum

Hoskinson’s insight into the model of Ethereum’s operation and governance could be attributed to his past involvement with the project as one of the eight original co-founders of Ethereum and CEO of the Ethereum Foundation. Along the line, his vision for the protocol clashed with that of Buterin, leading to his dismissal at a meeting in Switzerland in 2014.

On multiple occasions, Hoskinson has admitted his broader role in shaping the Cardano ecosystem. However, he argued that the new governance model is meant to make the ecosystem active with daily innovations “whether he is alive or dead.” 

It is important to note that Cardano recently executed its Chang hard fork to turn its asset into a governance token. This was to ensure that holders have the power to elect representatives and vote on developmental proposals as well as funding for community projects. According to our earlier report, this development implies that the Cardano Foundation, Input Output Global, and Emurgo, which have guided the project this far, can no longer initiate forks and upgrades. 

On the other hand, Hoskinson has accused Buterin of altering the roadmap of Ethereum towards “rollups and layer-2 networks for scalability” and away from “sharding-based optimization of the base chain.” Recently, its roadmap was subjected to criticism for enabling “extractive L2s” as fee revenue. 

Where does this idea of embracing layer 2s or rollups come from? Was it some random Ethereum engineer — or was it Vitalik Buterin writing a blog post about it, talking about it, and advocating for it?

At press time, ETH was trading at $2.6k after declining by 0.93% in the last 24 hours.