Charles Hoskinson Says Ethereum Is Adopting Cardano Ideas Without Credit

Hoskinson argues Cardano’s years of research deserve recognition as Ethereum explores similar technical approaches.

Charles Hoskinson has accused Ethereum of adopting ideas pioneered by Cardano without acknowledgment.

The Cardano co-founder made the claim following a proposal by Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter to bring native UTXOs to the network as a way of cutting long-term state storage for payment transactions.

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According to Hoskinson, Wahrstätter’s research closely mirrors concepts Cardano has been developing since its launch.

“It’s literally a crime in the Ethereum inner circle to mention Cardano,” he wrote on X. “EUTXO is the biggest innovation of the smart contract world and Ethereum cannot mention it as they literally try to copy it.”

Wahrstätter’s proposal describes a payment model that stores only a small “spent” marker in Ethereum’s state while keeping the rest of the payment data in blockchain history. According to the research, this approach could reduce the permanent state required for payment workloads by as much as 99.8% without abandoning Ethereum’s account-based architecture.

The proposal borrows the one-time payment structure used by Bitcoin’s UTXO model while allowing Ethereum accounts and smart contracts to keep on operating. It also relies on the proposed EIP-8141 transaction framework to let users spend UTXOs without first holding ETH for gas fees.

Hoskinson followed up his post on X with a livestream on the same platform, where he read a tweet by Wahrstätter announcing the proposal and pointed out that it made no reference to Cardano despite his network spending years solving many of the engineering problems that Ethereum is now exploring.

“For ten years, we’ve worked on extended UTXO, smart contracts on UTXO,” he said. “We wrote a paper called Chimeric Ledgers to show how to run these two systems in parallel.”

He argued that Ethereum developers had in the past dismissed UTXO-based smart contracts as impractical before now putting similar ideas on their long-term roadmap.

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During the livestream, Hoskinson expanded his criticism beyond Wahrstätter’s proposal, claiming that Ethereum has been regularly adopting ideas after dismissing them when they first appeared on Cardano.

Some of the areas he claimed such behavior had happened in included Cardano’s governance system and treasury model, which he said the Ethereum Foundation had been forced to drift toward after losing staff and money.

He also suggested that Ethereum would look to revisit Cardano’s work on privacy and post-quantum cryptography through IOHK’s privacy-focused blockchain project, Midnight, as well as its early embrace of formal verification tools like Lean. According to him, Ethereum will eventually adopt both without acknowledgment as well.

This is not the first time Hoskinson has used a livestream to vent about how he or Cardano is being treated. In June, he announced plans to move the Cardano community away from X and onto Discord, saying the social platform had become dominated by hostility and personal attacks. However, he said that he would keep using X for livestream broadcasts, the exact same format he used today to make his case against Ethereum.