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Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson Takes a Dig at Bitcoin and Avalanche
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The weekend was a busy one, at least for Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson whose tweets around Cardano and other rival blockchains stood out.
Hoskinson, on Saturday, posted a cheeky tweet in response to an April 2 post by Emin Gün Sirer, the CEO of Ava Labs – the firm behind the Avalanche blockchain. The latter, through his post, had poured scorn on Cardano's DeFi ecosystem citing its poor TVL figures relative to an Avalanche subnet.
A lively personality on Twitter, Hoskinson also shared a tweet on Sunday, this time picking holes in Bitcoin's UTXO model.
IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson responds to criticism by Avalanche founder
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson came into the defense of his blockchain over comments by Ava Labs CEO and founder Emin Gün Sirer. Sirer had brought into question the rate of growth of Cardano's decentralized finance ecosystem as shown by its total value locked, TVL.
Quoting a tweet by one user, the Avalanche executive compared the TVL of a subnet on the Avalanche chain to that of Cardano. DFK Chain, the subnet in question, had a TVL of $345 million on April 1, a day after launch, compared to Cardano, which had a figure of $334 million.
Data from Defi Llama at the time of writing shows that though the TVL on both platforms has since declined, Cardano still lags DFK Chain – $201.05 million vs. $215.09 million.
In response to Sirer's tweet, Hoskinson criticized Avalanche for lacking organic growth.
“That feeling when you deploy your enormous premine to boost your TVL,” he wrote.
The Cardano founder has previously remarked that changes coming on the network will have a huge impact on the value locked on Cardano's DeFi ecosystem. Last month, the Cardano creator said that many dApps are waiting for the Vasil update to arrive later this year. The upgrade will introduce diffusion pipelining to enable faster propagation of blocks. As it would cut on the dead time, general network throughput will improve.
Hoskinson says EUTXO breaks the barriers Bitcoin faced in its UTXO model
In a separate tweet shared over the weekend, Hoskinson suggested that Cardano's Extended Unspent Transaction Output (EUTXO) model is the next logical step in powering the larger DeFi space. He specifically noted that it is a massive improvement of the UTXO model as it takes advantage of 13 years of ‘experience'- alluding to the number of years since Bitcoin was created.
The comment was in response to a reply under a thread exploring the advantages of Cardano's EUTXO model over Ethereum's Account-based model.
UTXO and account-based models suffer limitations
Hoskinson recounted that at the time of Bitcoin's creation, the pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto opted for a UTXO model for its simplicity in ledger structuring of data in a complex computing environment.
However, this came with limitations, in that Bitcoin's expressiveness of programmability was significantly limited. This explains Vitalik Buterin's hesitation to use the UTXO model when developing Ethereum. Buterin initially considered Bitcoin's bookkeeping model in a pre-Ethereum project dubbed Colored Coins, which failed due to the said limitations, the thread's author Sooraj explained.
So, when Ethereum came along, it leveraged the Account-based model, which enabled smart contracts as it brought more expressiveness of programmability, unlike the UTXO model. However, the account model also faces a predicament – shared mutable state, which is when more than one party gains control (can modify) over the same data.
As such, issues (security) could result if their execution periods overlap as one entity's changes would cause the other entity to deviate from functioning normally. As Sooraj put it, “the account-based model has a much bigger surface area for attacks than the UTXO.”
In comes Cardano
The props for Cardano's EUTXO model are because it provides an improved version of the UTXO model with more expressiveness, hence eliminating the ‘shared mutable state' issue.
Offering a high level of scalability and parallelism, EUTXO has established better conditions, which Ethereum developers are “fundamentally missing on,” according to Hoskinson.
Given that Cardano's model separates transaction validation (left on-chain) from other logical processes (taken off-chain), it allows complex computational processes without affecting the transaction fees. This functionality of the model is a ‘compressed equivalent' of the relationship between Ethereum's mainnet and its layer two solutions.
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