Cardano [ADA]’s Charles Hoskinson: “I didn’t think Ethereum was going to succeed after I left”

Charles Hoskinson, the Founder of Cardano and Co-Founder of Ethereum, said that he did not think that Ethereum would succeed after he left the team, during a conversation with Mpho Dagada.

Charles was asked about why he branched out from Ethereum and decided not to complete the project. This was followed by him disclosing the reason behind leaving the Ethereum Foundation. According to him, there was a lack of rigorous structure and discipline. He believes that these are the “recipe for too much indulgence”.

He further added:

“If you pay people completely upfront, you really shouldn’t expect people to work hard. For eg., If you have an electrician and you say, rewire my whole house and here’s all the money to do it. He would be like, might as well show up on Wednesday, right? But what can you do, you’ve already paid the guy, right. You pay him after, so he has some motivation to do a good job.”

Prior to this statement, Charles said that at the initial point, the Foundation was divided into two groups, one was the business group and the other was the tech group. The teams had to decide on how to build the project. For this, they had two choices, become a for-profit company, like Ripple, which they called Crypto-Google or become a non-profit company, which they called Crypto-Mozilla.

This led to a distress between the business side and the tech side of the Foundation, with the business side preferring Crypto-Google and the tech side preferring Crypto-Mozilla. However, the Co-Founder of Ethereum had stated that his main concern was that there was no proper structure in the project. This would have led to the burn of the whole capital before the launch of the product and result in a lot of problems. Succeeding this, Vitalik Buterin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum, took a call and declared that Ethereum would be a non-profit company aka Crypto-Mozilla.

Charles said that he was frustrated about not having a great experience with BitShares and Ethereum. After which, he was tensed about whether to come back to the cryptocurrency space or do something outside it. However, the speech he delivered in Bermuda during a TedTalk about what he learned helped him realize that there was still one thing left for him to do in the space.

The Founder of Cardano said:

“And at that point, I realized that I still have something left in me. There is still one more venture, but if I was going to do, I’m going to do it in a way I want it to. A 100% my philosophy and we’ll see for better or worse if it fails or not.”

This was followed by him starting Input Output Hong Kong along with Jeremy Wood, whom he worked alongside at Ethereum. They took a contract in Japan and it eventually became Cardano. The company went from two people to over 160 people in 16 countries.