In a wide-ranging CoinDesk interview released yesterday, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson sharpened a years-long critique of Ethereum’s long-term viability, arguing that the network’s reliance on rollups and external scaling layers has created economic incentives that will ultimately hollow out the base chain. While acknowledging Ethereum’s technical progress, he contended that “as a general-purpose, smart-contract ledger,” the project has nurtured an ecosystem that “will slowly but surely eat [it] alive.”
“So if they’re gobbling up the transaction volume and gobbling up the users and they’re gobbling up the token appreciation, if there’s a more attractive target, they could simply migrate or go multi-chain,” Hoskinson said, adding that this trend is already observable with LayerZero and Espresso.
That erosion, Hoskinson argued, is set to accelerate as two external forces gather momentum. First, he described Bitcoin DeFi as a “sleeping giant” that could attract “hundreds of billions” in total value once primitives such as stablecoins, DEXs and lending are built with credible security assumptions. “When Bitcoin wakes up… its TVL will be… larger than the market cap of Ethereum,” he said, noting that sovereigns and major asset managers would likely prefer to build around Bitcoin exposure.
Second, he expects large technology platforms and traditional financial institutions to enter with their own infrastructure, adjacent to public chains but not economically dependent on Ethereum’s base layer—“Microsoft… Google… Amazon… have no incentive to go boost Ethereum or deploy on Ethereum,” he said.
The technological arc, in Hoskinson’s telling, also tilts away from shared-state blockchains. As zero-knowledge proofs and “proof-carrying code” mature, more computation can be executed off-chain—in secure enclaves, on devices, or within MPC systems—leaving the chain to verify succinct proofs. “Why… spend billions of dollars a year maintaining this very weak computer that’s shared and replicated,” he asked, “when you can turn it into a distributed problem that runs everywhere?”
Notably, Hoskinson’s assessment was not unqualified dismissal. He credited Ethereum for “keeping up with the times,” investing in rollups and zero-knowledge technology, and building a “Goliath” ecosystem that survived early funding scares and the DAO crisis. “They’ve done some really incredible things,” he said, and he allowed that “it’s entirely possible that Ethereum could pivot… and get very good at that” new role. The nub of his skepticism is not competence but structure: in his view, the more rollups succeed, the less compelling the L1 becomes as the economic hub.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.89.
