Cardano Founder Fires Shots at ETH Merge But Isn’t Eyeing ADA 10x Soon

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has taken a rather unfiltered approach to discussing Ethereum post-merge.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Hoskinson described Ethereum as the “Hotel California of cryptocurrencys [SIC] – you can check in but you can’t check out.” Hoskinson explained that users have to “lock their funds for an intderminate amount of time,” which can be lost through the “slashing mechanism” when “bad things happen.”

Hoskinson, who had founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin in 2013 but was removed from the project a year later, said the current team has “chosen to go to a bizarre model that doesn’t have a lot of security but has a lot of operational overhead.”

“Ultimately it’s created a situation that’s going to drain liquidity from their system,” he said. “As funds get locked to participate in consensus, you’ll have less and less Ether trading in the marketplace. You’ll have a liquidity crisis with big price spikes but big price declines.”

Hoskinson further highlighted that a hard fork is needed to unlocked staked ETH. “Who knows when that’s coming. There’s actual tweets from Ethereum core developers saying: ‘we don’t care.’ My understanding is they require another hard fork to enable the unlocking of funds but here’s no clock on it.”

ADA to the Moon – Or Maybe Not

With the Ethereum merge leaving little for ETH bulls to latch onto in the forseeable future, and being the byproduct of the “sell the news” mentality, traders have set their sights on Cardano token ADA.

Last week, the Cardano community was asked if ADA could hit US$10 (it’s currently US$0.40 at the time of writing).

“Yes! But in a few years,” replied one Twitter user. “Less than 3 years easy,” another more optimistic ADA fan wrote. “9 dollars per $ADA by 2025 Q4,” another said.

However, Hoskinson himself said he’s not banking on ADA 10x or 100x-ing any time soon, and actively discourages such incentives to hodling the token.

“How fast do you want us to go? At LUNA speed?” Hoskinson sarcastically said in the same Cointelegraph interview. “It’s preposterous when you’re talking about a system that is in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money. At the end of the day, if they fail, they could even result in death, like a privacy coin – if a person gets doxxed they they could be killed by their government or arrested.”

“You get people that say ‘oh well the only thing that matters is getting as many customers as quickly as possible.’ What they’re really saying is ‘we’d like the token price to go up 10x or 100x so we can sell and make money,” Hoskinson explained.

“If you’re really concerned about government adoption, company adoption, and real use and utility, and billions of customers, the protocol should be around for 10 years, or 20 years, or 30 years, or 40 years, like TCP/IP, for example, with the internet, so you have plenty of time to think about these things.”

“What really matters is your growth curve,” he continued. “Cardano keeps getting more capable every year. We now have smart contracts, we have blockchain-based governance. We have the best in class consensus protocol, we have a strong, stable community, we’ve always been a top-10 cryptocurrency. And it looks like we’re going to fare very well in the next bull market.”

Cardano’s slow and steady growth has prevented them from disasters large-scale DeFi hacks, protocol failure and “99% reduction in token value overnight because of a flawed economic model,” Hoskinson said.

Business on Cardano Blockchain

There are over 1,000 projects being built on the Cardano blockchain. Some of its leading dApps include decentralised exchanges MinSwap (MIN) and Ardana (DANA), staking platform Meld (MELD), metaverse Cornucopias (COPI), property financier Empowa (EMP) and algorithmic stablecoin Djed (DJED).