Cardano’s Founder Offers to Solve Ethereum’s Privacy Problem

• The offer came right after the Ethereum Foundation dropped a new governance paper.
• Hoskinson noted that Ethereum is heading toward a governance setup, same as Cardano’s.
• Charles Hoskinson was originally part of the founding team of Ethereum.

Charles Hoskinson, who founded Cardano and helped start Ethereum, stirred things up by offering to help Ethereum improve its governance model. The offer came right after the Ethereum Foundation dropped a new governance paper, laying out how it plans to steer the ecosystem going forward.

The document showcases several main ideas, including pushing decisions down to the community (subsidiarity), protecting Ethereum’s core values, and eventually fading out, meaning the Foundation’s role shrinks as the ecosystem learns to govern itself.

Above all, the paper also reminds Foundation teams that Ethereum’s core values, which are censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security (CROPS), always come first. After reading through it, Hoskinson noted that Ethereum seems to be heading toward a governance setup that Cardano already has in place.

He made a slightly tongue-in-cheek offer, saying that Ethereum devs could hold their own constitutional convention, just like Cardano did. Hoskinson then added that maybe the event can be held at the same spot, the University of Buenos Aires, which helped host Cardano’s governance discussions.

This references Cardano’s 2024 Constitutional Convention at UBA, a big moment in the blockchain’s Voltaire phase, where the community came together to draft and approve a constitution.

He also pointed out that Cardano already has a full governance system in place, complete with a constitution, committee, and community voting on upgrades. This system gives Cardano a formal governance process, while Ethereum still mostly runs on whatever devs and the community informally agree on.

According to Hoskinson, Ethereum runs on trust and moral authority, whereas Cardano has actual rules and ways to enforce them.

Related: Charles Hoskinson Says Cardano Now Hosts the World’s Largest DAO

A Long-Standing Rivalry

Charles Hoskinson was originally part of the founding team of Ethereum, but he left the project in 2014 after disagreements with co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

The split came down to structure. Hoskinson wanted VC money and a for-profit setup, while Buterin pushed for a nonprofit foundation instead. In the end, Ethereum went with the nonprofit route. Hoskinson, meanwhile, launched Cardano in 2015, built with a much more formal approach to governance from the start.

Ever since, the two ecosystems have traded occasional jabs over governance, speed, and development approaches.

Related: Charles Hoskinson Explains Why Cardano Is Missing From Mastercard’s 87 Crypto Partner List