Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, admits one of the project’s biggest missteps regarding its smart contract model, acknowledging how it lost momentum to Solana.
In a recent interview, the Cardano founder publicly admitted that the team made a wrong bet with the project’s early approach to smart contracts. According to him, this wrong bet made it difficult for developers to build on Cardano.
While Cardano’s design prioritizes security and robustness, as evidenced by its record of no major hacks or bugs, the tradeoff comes in the form of limited flexibility, weak composability, and challenges for developer accessibility. He emphasized that building smart contracts on Cardano in its early days was difficult.
Cardano Lost Momentum to Solana
Meanwhile, Hoskinson recounted Cardano’s incredible performance in September 2021, when its native token reached an all-time high of $3.10.
He stated that Cardano was doing well at the time and eventually ranked as the third-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. Notably, one of the factors that fueled Cardano’s 2021 rally was the anticipation of smart contracts.
The Alonzo hard fork in September 2021 marked the launch of Cardano’s smart contract functionality, implemented through the eUTXO model.
According to Hoskinson, the difficulty of building decentralized applications on Cardano hindered this momentum and allowed Solana to gain traction. Developers seeking a faster and easier smart contract-enabled platform moved to Solana, which launched in 2020.
Hoskinson Remains Optimistic
Despite the wrong bet, Hoskinson remains optimistic. He believes Cardano’s early choices will be vindicated, especially with the ecosystem now offering improved development tools.
However, he still sees the missed opportunity as a clear example of where Cardno bet wrong, which gave Solana an edge.
Despite facing multiple technical issues over the years, Solana has emerged as a key hub for developers seeking an alternative to Ethereum. This has elevated SOL’s value, propelling it to sixth place in the global cryptocurrency ranking.
Cardano, on the other hand, has dropped from the third position, where it ranked in September 2021, to 10th place.
Meanwhile, Cardano has made significant progress in enhancing its smart contract functionality. A year after implementing the Alonzo hard fork, the Cardano team launched the Vasil hard fork, enhancing the Plutus smart contract language.
This upgrade makes building on Cardano cheap and efficient. Since then, Cardano’s smart contracts, particularly Plutus, have remained under continuous development.
These efforts have fueled wider adoption, evident in the recent surge in smart contract deployments on Cardano. As reported last month, the number of active smart contracts on the network surpassed 300,000.
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