Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum and current CEO IOHK, recently made an appearance as a guest on the Ivan on Tech Podcast, and spoke about the progress of the Cardano Blockchain. On the podcast he made a big statement by expressing his belief that Cardano is 100 times more decentralized than Bitcoin.
Since IOHK released the “Cardano whiteboard and overview with Charles Hoskinson” video in October 2017, the company has rolled out big improvements into the platform, and Hoskinson was on set to update the public on the going-ons at the company.
He went on to speak about the progress made by Cardano, while also revealing the platform’s road map. He was the Ivan show alongside compiler engineer, Michael Payton Jones, and leader of the Plutus team Manuel Chakravarty. The entire podcast centered on Cardano and platforms based on functional programming languages. The spice of the entire conversation though was Hoskinson’s detailed insight into Cardano and the progress that’s happened on the platform.
In the interview Hoskinson revealed that Cardano started back in 2015 as an aspirational venture, which was sparked off by the realization of Ethereum’s shortcomings, despite it being more technically advanced than Bitcoin.
He explained that Ethereum’s challenge was the fact that its Solidity couldn’t be used across different blockchains as it lacked three important attributes that a programming language should have which was simplicity, conciseness, and proof of correctness. Hoskinson then went to work and considered a functional programming language as an all-encompassing solution for the problems blockchain face.
Hoskinson went on to explain Cardano’s edge over other Blockchains by saying that it made it easier to deal with distributed systems, with its functional code being able to discover bugs as well as other problems. Some of the popular functional programming languages include scala, Haskell, Erlang, and Ocaml. Cardano also enables easy parallelization which explains why it’s been taken up by major investment banks as well as financial institutions. The blockchain is also considered safer, more predictable and faster than object-oriented programming languages.
Hoskinson also spoke about the ‘shelley’ update, which is a phase in Cardano’s development that will allow for more decentralization. He explained that Shelley had the ability to bring about the kind of decentralization that is yet to be seen or achieved. He explained that allowing users to delegate their stake in Cardano’s pool would help make the blockchain, the most decentralized among all others.
Though he did not reveal the exact date that the shelley MainNet would go live, he said that Cardano would emerge “100 times more decentralized than Bitcoin.” Another major plus for Cardano is the fact that the blockchain is written in Haskell- a programming language that enables the formal verification of smart contracts- which could prove invaluable for the financial industry as it edges towards decentralization.
He also made another update known, which is the development of Goguen, which will include the development of a new “universal language framework to be used as core infrastructure for future blockchain technologies.”
2019 looks like it will be the year for Cardano, though others would have you look at Ripple as the real star of 2019. It’s really interesting to watch the development of Altcoins that are just below ethereum. There seems to be more happening in the lower Altcoin space than in the main cryptos.
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