CryptoPotato recently sat down with the co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of the popular cryptocurrency Cardano, Charles Hoskinson to discuss recent events in the crypto space. During the interview with IOHKs CEO, several topics were brought up including what makes Cardano different from everything else, the blockchain potential in Africa and the current state of blockchain protocols.

The first question that Hoskinson was asked was how Cardano is different from Ethereum and what makes it unique. To this, the co-founder said:

“When I was working at Ethereum, we had a lot of options about how much innovation we wanted to put forward. We created Ethereum with the idea that if we have a programming language attached to a blockchain, this could push out more complicated financial transactions and we would see what the space would do with that. We assumed that we would see a rehash of what had been done with Namecoin, Mastercoin, and Colorcoin – that would form the dominant use case for Ethereum for the next 4-5 years. And to a certain extent, we were right.”

Furthermore, Hoskinson added:



“There is definitely room to keep the innovation going, take what we’ve developed with Ethereum and architecturally break Ethereum apart. Then, develop two different independent systems: one is accounting, and the other is computation. So basically, it’s taking the lessons we’ve learned from Ethereum and from studying Bitcoin and building a multi-layered system.”

A later question, Hoskinson was asked was regarding Cardano’s involvement in blockchain adoption for Africa and he was asked to explain more about this.

“Talking about supply chain management, right now we have an office in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and we are doing a lot of research on how to get coffee farmers into a blockchain setting. The local government is quite keen on figuring out how we plan to take the million and a half Ethiopian coffee farmers and get them digital credentials. The next step is to model how coffee goes through the entire supply chain.”

In addition to this:



“So, the minute you can put these farmers into an immutable ledger like Hyperledger Fabric or Enterprise Cardano, they now have a real connection. This means that you can connect to the side chain and use Cardano for lending, remittances, insurance or any of these types of financial products.”

Finally, Hoskinson was asked about where he sees Cardano going next year

“In 2019, we are planning to catch up regarding functionality and utility, and at that point, we can release some protocols and show the market how it gets done. We’re already starting to see a change in the industry from a research standpoint. For example, I was at CCS, a cryptographic conference in Toronto. Usually, you’d go there and only see cryptographers. But I saw cryptocurrency companies as well, and they were presenting their research.”

Hoskinson finally adds:



“If we succeed, the only way to compete with Cardano will be to emulate our engineering, which means that the software quality will dramatically increase in the entire space. If that’s our only accomplishment and Cardano doesn’t become a commercial success, that’s still great because it makes the world a better place for everybody.”

Hoskinson also said that he is hoping that Cardano will stay very competitive and that it will hopefully get back in the top five cryptocurrencies in terms of the market cap next year too.

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down below in the comments!