Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Layer 1 blockchain Cardano, criticized the current governance model of Ethereum in an interview with Cointelegraph in Singapore. He believes that the blockchain relies too much on its co-founder Vitalik Buterin to guide the direction. He also stated that Cardano’s “Voltaire” era governance reforms prevent it from becoming a “dictatorship” like Ethereum.
Hoskinson said that blockchains can choose to keep the protocol simple forever, like Bitcoin, or "choose a king" to rule over everything. However, Cardano's new governance model solves the "governance trilemma" of "efficiency, effectiveness and integrity" by entrusting representatives and a membership organization called Intersect to refine complex governance issues for voting.
Hoskinson said: “If you have these three elements, then you have a fair chance of avoiding the anarchy of Bitcoin or the dictatorship of Ethereum, and you actually have something to speak with a unified voice. Moving forward, it’s still ultimately decentralized because it represents everyone.”
When asked to explain his controversial remarks comparing Ethereum to a dictatorship, Hoskinson said that the "overall vision" for Ethereum began and ended with 30-year-old Buterin.
“Everyone looks to him for a road map, for inspiration, and he’s the only one with enough influence to bring everyone together,” Hoskinson said. “If you take him out of the equation now, then the next one What will a hard fork look like? How quickly can they happen?”
Hoskinson said Buterin was largely responsible for changing Ethereum's roadmap from sharding-based optimization of the base chain to rollups and second-layer network scalability. In recent months, as fee revenue and activity on Ethereum's L1 have declined, its roadmap has been criticized for empowering "extractive L2s."
Although Hoskinson believes that Ethereum is deeply influenced by Buterin's vision, Buterin does not have absolute power in this decentralized network. Ethereum uses a hybrid approach to off-chain and on-chain governance, which includes input from the Ethereum Foundation and the community and stakeholders on Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), while key decisions are made at core developer meetings. Controversial decisions can lead to hard forks, such as the rollback of The DAO hack that led to the fork of Ethereum Classic.
Hoskinson was one of Ethereum's eight original co-founders and chief executive, but his vision for the protocol's profitability conflicted with Buterin's, and Hoskinson was fired at a conference in Switzerland in 2014.
Cardano’s governance
Hoskinson admitted that he has played a broadly similar role in shaping Cardano since 2015, but said that the network's new governance model is designed to ensure that "it doesn't matter whether Charles lives or dies, there is still innovation every day."
Cardano's Chang hard fork in early September transformed ADA into a governance token that allows holders to elect representatives and vote on funding for development proposals and community projects. The founding entities that have guided the project so far (Cardano Foundation, Input Output Global (IOHK) and Emurgo) are no longer able to trigger forks and upgrades.
The interaction between the membership-based group of researchers and engineers, known as Intersect, and commissioned representatives is a more "collaborative model" that can operate with or without active founders, Hoskinson said. “They can communicate with each other, vote, and propose and leverage a blockchain-based organization to regularly approve the roadmap,” he said.
Cardano is still working to finalize a constitution that could set hard limits on some core issues, such as supply and how it is governed.
