Members of the IOHK team, including Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, were recently invited to Google’s London offices to share their thoughts on Cardano and cryptocurrency in general. IOHK is the technical arm of the Cardano project, which also consists of the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo. A blog post made by IOHK includes transcripts of a Q&A session, which has some great insight into how the people behind Cardano think about their project.

One of the most interesting topics that came up was Ethereum’s first-mover advantage. As we know, Ethereum has established itself as by far the most dominant blockchain platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications – ETH’s market capitalization of $47.8 billion is second only to Bitcoin, while its nearest competitor, EOS, stands at $8.1 billion. Cardano and NEO are also serious contenders for the blockchain platform throne.

Charles Hoskinson does not believe that Ethereum’s position is set in stone. While it is true that Ethereum is currently by far the most popular platform of its kind, it still doesn’t see widespread real-world use.

“So how many Java, C++ or Go developers are writing code on Ethereum? You can’t, Ethereum doesn’t support any of these languages. They can’t even run a single viral app on the platform. If you look at the top 10 languages, none of them works on the system, so, by definition, all those developers aren’t developing for the system, they have to go and learn new tools and new stuff.”

Hoskinson concluded his answer:

“The other thing is that very few people today write smart contracts. They play with these things, but very few people are smart contract developers. If 99% of developers aren’t in the ecosystem, how can you say a person has first-mover advantage? It’s nuts.”

By having an in-depth discussion with IOHK, Google has shown some good faith to the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, despite announcing a ban of cryptocurrency and ICO advertisements – perhaps, the company is waiting for more regulatory clarity on the subject and we will see an update of their policy in the coming months.