Hoskinson Reveals Cardano Biggest Mistake That Benefited Solana

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.

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

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.