Charles Hoskinson Slams Ethereum, Says It Will Be ‘Dead In 10 Years Like Blackberry’

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has launched a blistering critique of Ethereum, predicting the leading smart contract platform will become obsolete within the next decade. 

Drawing comparisons to once-dominant tech brands like MySpace and Blackberry, Hoskinson argued Ethereum is a victim of its own success and now faces mounting threats from both internal inefficiencies and rising competitors.

“I don’t think Ethereum will survive more than 10 to 15 years,” Hoskinson said in a surprise AMA session on Wednesday. “The layer twos will continue to suckle out all of the alpha… users will gradually migrate to other places. Then they’re going to get eclipsed by Bitcoin DeFi.”

Notably, Hoskinson, one of Ethereum’s original eight co-founders, claimed that Ethereum’s trajectory is unsustainable, following a fallout with Vitalik Buterin in 2014. According to him, the growing complexity of its scaling roadmap, centered around rollups and layer-2 solutions, will ultimately fracture the ecosystem and alienate users.

He further suggested that Bitcoin-based decentralized finance (DeFi), which is slowly gaining traction, will eventually surpass Ethereum in terms of total value locked (TVL), drawing more users away from the Ethereum ecosystem. 

“Once that Bitcoin DeFi turns on, the TVL will be larger than Ethereum,” he added.

This isn’t the first time Hoskinson has taken aim at Ethereum. Last September, he described the network as a “dictatorship,” accusing Buterin of holding excessive sway over the platform’s development. “Ethereum’s entire vision starts and ends with Vitalik,” he asserted at the time, criticizing the shift away from sharding in favor of layer-2 scalability.

He elaborated that, unlike Bitcoin’s simple and stable protocol, Ethereum chose to “pick a king,” claiming Buterin’s decisions, such as backing rollups, have led to a fragmented ecosystem dominated by what he calls “extractive L2s.”

However, some Ethereum supporters have argued otherwise. While Buterin plays a key role in shaping Ethereum’s vision, governance is more decentralized than Hoskinson implies. The protocol incorporates community proposals (EIPs), developer discussions, and guidance from the Ethereum Foundation.

Meanwhile, despite the tensions, Hoskinson showed some openness last Sunday, responding positively to Buterin’s technical proposal advocating for a shift to RISC-V architecture from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). 

“It makes sense,” he said, referencing Cardano’s own exploration of RISC-V with BitVMX.

The nod is significant as Cardano has also been exploring RISC-V through its BitVMX initiative. Notably, Cardano’s extended UTxO model is now being integrated with BitVMX FORCE, a collaborative project that aims to enable Cardano dApps to access Bitcoin liquidity and unlock new layers of DeFi potential.