- Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has a grim outlook on Ethereum.
- Ethereum has increasingly been the subject of significant concern from investors and mockery from competitors.
- The Ethereum Foundation is taking steps to turn the tide.
It is no secret that there is no love lost between Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Ethereum. Since his acrimonious divorce from the blockchain he helped found, he has routinely thrown shade at it while exchanging subliminal jabs with fellow co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
But Hoskinskon’s most recent commentary on Ethereum is particularly grim, even by his standards.
Don't Miss:
- Trade crypto futures on Plus500 with up to $200 in bonuses — no wallets, just price speculation and free paper trading to practice different strategies.
- Grow your IRA or 401(k) with Crypto – unlock the power of alternative investments including a Crypto IRA within your retirement account.
‘A Victim Of Its Own Success’
“I don’t think Ethereum will survive more than 10 to 15 years,” Hoskinson told followers in a Wednesday ask-me-anything session when asked what he would do differently if he were running the Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit supporting the network.
His remarks come at a time when Ethereum has increasingly been the subject of significant concern from investors and mockery from competitors. Amid growing uncertainty around the asset’s investment thesis, it has grossly underperformed the competition over the past two years.
In Hoskinson’s telling, Ethereum’s challenges may be too fundamental to tackle.
“The number one problem Ethereum has is that they took an easy road out where they did three things wrong,” he said.
Hoskinson claimed Ethereum had the wrong protocols, pointing to the network’s accounting model, virtual machine, and consensus model, which have posed security and scalability hurdles. He added that the network’s attempts to solve these problems with “slashing economics” and Layer 2 chains, which have been dubbed as parasitic, only deepened the quagmire. Finally, he said the network did not have a good on-chain governance model.
Trending: New to crypto? Get up to $400 in rewards for successfully completing short educational courses and making your first qualifying trade on Coinbase.
While Hoskinson conceded that solutions to these issues existed, he opined that they would likely prove difficult at Ethereum’s scale.
“The layer 2s will continue to suckle out all of the alpha, and people will start fighting, and it’ll get harder and harder for Vitalik to be able to hold it together through sheer force of will, and users will gradually migrate to other places,” he said.
He argued that Ethereum was “a victim of its own success,” likening it to Myspace and BlackBerry.
Indeed, it has recently felt like institutional investors and whales are cutting their losses and taking their business elsewhere. In perhaps the most poignant example of this, crypto smart money tracker Lookonchain on Tuesday reported that Galaxy Digital deposited over $105 million in ETH to the leading crypto exchange Binance in the past two weeks while withdrawing almost an equivalent amount of SOL.
But while Hoskinson and a number of investors may have given up on Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation has yet to do so.
In the wake of growing concerns, the organization has undergone a restructuring and unveiled a focus on Layer 1 scaling and user experience improvements.
Whether these steps would be enough to turn the tide remains to be seen.
Read Next:
- A must-have for all crypto enthusiasts: Sign up for the Gemini Credit Card today and earn rewards on Bitcoin Ether, or 60+ other tokens, with every purchase.
- Maximize saving for your retirement and cut down taxes: Schedule your free call with a financial advisor to start your financial journey – no cost, no obligation.
Image/Shutterstock
© 2025 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Trade confidently with insights and alerts from analyst ratings, free reports and breaking news that affects the stocks you care about.
