Hoskinson Accuses Ethereum of Lifting Cardano's Architecture Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, has accused Ethereum of attempting to replicate Cardano's Extended UTXO (EUTXO) model while
Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, has accused Ethereum of attempting to replicate Cardano's Extended UTXO (EUTXO) model while refusing to credit its origins. He described EUTXO as the biggest innovation in smart contracts and claimed it is "a crime in the Ethereum inner circles to mention Cardano." Hoskinson says he has spent more than a decade developing the model and argues it has already been proven at scale.
The comments came in response to a proposal published by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter that explores bringing native UTXOs to Ethereum. Under Ethereum's current account-based model, receiving a payment adds state permanently: the first time an address receives $ETH, it gets a permanent account leaf, and the first time it holds an ERC-20, a permanent storage slot. Wahrstätter's proposal looks to address that by introducing a Bitcoin-style approach to payments on Ethereum.
Cardano is a UTXO-based blockchain that implements an Extended Unspent Transaction Output (EUTXO) model, introduced by the Alonzo upgrade to support multi-assets and smart contracts. The model extends the base UTXO design so that addresses can contain arbitrary scripted logic, enabling full smart contract functionality. The success or failure of transaction validation depends only on the transaction itself and its inputs, and not on anything else on the blockchain. As a consequence, the validity of a transaction can be checked off-chain, before it is sent to the blockchain.
EUTXO potentially permits multiple transactions to process simultaneously, significantly boosting scalability, because transactions only depend on their inputs and can, in principle, validate in parallel without interfering with each other. These properties stand in contrast to Ethereum's account-based system, where assets reside in accounts and the state of the blockchain can change during transaction validation.
Hoskinson's claims arrive at a moment of significant architectural debate within Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin gave a fresh overview of Ethereum's long-term direction and highlighted a proposal to bring Bitcoin-style UTXOs to Ethereum. Whether Ethereum's renewed interest in UTXO-based design constitutes convergence, inspiration, or outright copying remains a matter of dispute, but the debate has reignited long-standing tensions between the two ecosystems.
Sources:Native UTXOs on Ethereum, Ethereum ResearchExtended UTXO Model, Cardano DocsCardano's EUTXO Model, Input Output (IOHK)
