Charles Hoskinson Claims Ethereum Will Not Survive “More than 10 to 15 years”

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson claimed Wednesday that Ethereum, the blockchain he co-founded, will become obsolete in the next 10 to 15 years.

Ethereum currently boasts a market capitalization of over $212 billion, securing its place as the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. Its native token, ETH, is trading around $1,760 at the time of writing, while Cardano’s ADA token is priced at approximately $0.73, with a market cap just under $27 billion, according to CoinGecko.

In a video shared on YouTube, Hoskinson argues that Ethereum has made three major errors that will lead to it becoming obsolete within the next decade or so. He likens Ethereum’s trajectory to that of Myspace and Blackberry, calling it a “victim of its own success.”

Problems with Ethereum

“So first off…they have the wrong accounting model, they have the wrong virtual machine, and they have the wrong consensus model,” Hoskinson explains.

Hoskinson claims all these decisions were “self-inflicted wounds” that experts cautioned against. “Second, what they chose to do to solve these problems is put in all these weird slashing economics and Layer 2s (L2), and now they're living with all of the consequences of these types of things.”

The third issue, he argues, is Ethereum’s lack of a robust on-chain governance system.

“What needs to happen is a parallel track with solving all three things,” he said. “First off, you have to solve the technological problem – the current protocol they have for proof-of-stake is wrong, and they need to wean themselves off of that protocol gradually.”

Hoskinson pointed to Sui’s object model as an example worth emulating. Unlike blockchains that rely on accounts with key-value stores, Sui’s model centers around objects as the primary units of storage, according to Sui documentation.

Unsurprisingly, Hoskinson was full of praise for Cardano’s approach, saying “we thought a lot about how to build a Layer 2 ecosystem in Cardano that's non-parasitic but actually symbiotic – that's what Midnight is doing with Cardano.... so we have the right accounting model, we have the right consensus model, and we have the right virtual machine model.”

RISC-V

Hoskinson concluded his critique by supporting Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s proposal to transition to the RISC-V architecture, a model that Cardano already uses.

“I think it is good to go to RISC-V. That’s a really good decision for Vitalik to make. It makes a lot of sense,” Hoskinson said. “But the accounting model also needs to be revised.”

RISC-V, as Buterin has proposed, would replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) – the environment in which Ethereum smart contracts are executed.

According to Buterin, adopting RISC-V would “greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks, and can also greatly improve the execution layer’s simplicity.”