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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says the next phase of cryptocurrency adoption will be driven less by faster blockchains and more by safety, governance and consumer protections.
Ethereum ‘Keeps Doing Things Wrong’
In an interview with CoinDesk on July 23, Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum before launching Cardano, was sharply critical of the network’s governance model.
He argued Ethereum lacks an on-chain treasury capable of sustainably funding long-term development and instead depends on a handful of influential organizations.
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“If Ethereum was to just take 5% of protocol revenue and give it to the Ethereum Foundation, they’d have $390 million a year to work with,” he said.
Hoskinson also criticized Ethereum’s reliance on large companies to shape development priorities, arguing that meaningful decentralization requires token holders, not corporations, to determine the network’s future through on-chain voting.
He said Cardano’s governance framework, while slower to develop, provides a more sustainable long-term model.
“People are starting to wake up, especially in the age of AI hacking where everything is getting broken, that speed to market is not necessarily the most desirable thing,” Hoskinson said.
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Crypto Needs An Insurance Layer
Following a recent bridge exploit involving Cardano-related infrastructure, Hoskinson said the industry’s biggest missing component is insurance.
He proposed optional insurance products for crypto wallets and cross-chain bridges, funded through premiums and backed by collateral pools.
Under the model, users would pay recurring fees while protocols meeting defined security standards could qualify for coverage.
Insurance would compensate victims after hacks and encourage better software practices across the industry, he said.
“You need financial systems with rule of law and checks and balances and the ability to get restitution when bad things happen,” Hoskinson said.
Hoskinson expects the next wave of crypto adoption to come from integrating blockchain with identity, privacy, insurance and real-world financial infrastructure rather than simply increasing transaction throughput.
