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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes no one blockchain will dominate the crypto sector, but rather, there will be an “internet of blockchains.” The network recently underwent a major upgrade that gave it the ability to host smart contracts and other applications like non-fungible tokens.
Its native ada token has gained nearly 1,250% this year, and is now the third-largest by market capitalization, behind bitcoin and ether.
Hoskinson recently spoke with Insider about the key alonzo network upgrade, the future of decentralized finance and how smaller blockchains like cardano haven’t yet seen the benefits of institutional investors jumping on the crypto bandwagon.
He covered a variety of subjects, ranging from maximalism in the crypto space, welcomed more “quality standards” for networks and even spoke about his upcoming tour in Africa – the world’s third fastest growing crypto economy.
Here are the 10 best quotes, lightly edited for clarity:
- “Unfortunately in our industry, there’s a great degree of maximalism if you go and talk to a bitcoin person, they are like: ‘bitcoin is the only truth and everything else is a sh*t coin’.”
- “The other thing is DeFi needs to turn into ‘real-fi’ and needs to grow up, so that means it needs governance and true decentralization.”
- “It needs to have metadata standards, it needs to have quality standards, it needs to have real customers, it needs to have identity built in, all these types of things.” – on what decentralized finance needs to mature.
- “What’s great about cryptocurrencies – they’re divorced from humanity in this respect.”
- “It’s not necessarily about who’s cheapest right now, it’s about variance.” – on discussing transaction fees on different crypto networks.
- “(I am going to) go right to Africa, and we’re going to South Africa, we’re going to Tanzania, Zanzibar, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya and Egypt and we’re meeting five heads of state.” – on his upcoming tour of Africa, where crypto adoption has soared 1,200% in a year.
- “This (funding) round (raised) $4 million – we think over 50,000 participated, and – that engine keeps growing.” – on Cardano’s latest funding efforts.
- “Almost all the growth has been like bitcoin – organic, and it didn’t have some centralized driving force that was doing market-making deals behind the scenes. Now that was a double-edged sword, it meant it took a hell of a lot longer for us to get listed on Coinbase.” – on the challenge of purely organic growth.
- “(Institutional investors) tend to only buy bitcoin – but they’re starting now to use utility impact, environmental concerns and other things as investment criteria, which excludes bitcoin.” – on investor reservations over bitcoin.
- “So then they have to move down the line and actually have to go with proof of stake systems and we’re the largest. So we think we should get the lion’s share of those allocations.” – on cardano’s edge over its competitors.
