Cardano Founder Hoskinson Claims Ethereum Is Secretly Copying Its Biggest Innovation

Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson has accused Ethereum of copying Cardano’s Extended Unspent Transaction Output (EUTXO) model while treating any mention of the project as taboo. A new Ethereum research proposal triggered the outburst.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter published the design this week. It treats payments as one-shot objects, meaning temporary entries rather than permanent state records.

Native UTXO Proposal Targets Ethereum State Growth

On Ethereum, the first payment to any address writes a permanent state entry. Wahrstätter argues that most simple payments never need one. Instead, his proposal proves a payment’s existence from history and keeps only a single spent marker in state.

Bitcoin (BTC) pioneered these one-shot objects. Each payment exists once, gets spent once, and then disappears from the ledger’s active memory.

According to the researcher, this design cuts permanent state for payment workloads by roughly 99.8%. A fresh account entry occupies around 100 to 150 bytes, while a native UTXO leaves about 0.3 bytes behind. The plan builds on a pending Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), the Frame Transactions standard EIP-8141.

Wahrstätter credited Vitalik Buterin for raising the topic. Meanwhile, the idea arrives as Buterin promotes his Lean Ethereum roadmap, which also targets a lighter protocol.

Why Hoskinson Says Ethereum Is Copying Cardano

Hoskinson responded. The Cardano founder spent more than a decade developing the EUTXO design that powers his chain’s smart contracts. It tracks funds as individual unspent outputs rather than running account balances. However, he claims Ethereum developers refuse to acknowledge that work.

“EUTXO is the biggest innovation of the smart contract world and Ethereum cannot mention it as they literally try to copy it.”

Hoskinson wrote in an X post. He added that mentioning Cardano is “literally a crime” in Ethereum’s inner circles. He also noted that his project once ranked third on CoinMarketCap and served millions of users.

The remarks cap a combative stretch for the founder. In recent weeks, he championed the Leios scaling upgrade while weathering calls for his removal from parts of the community.

Market Context for ADA and ETH

Markets showed little reaction to the exchange. ADA trades near $0.17 after a 12.5% weekly gain, per BeInCrypto Markets data. Still, the token ranks 18th by market cap, far below the third place Hoskinson referenced.

Ethereum (ETH) changes hands at $1,754 with a $211 billion market cap, second overall. Moreover, the recent ADA rebound came alongside a spike in new wallets in early July.

Wahrstätter’s design remains a research post, and no formal EIP exists yet. Any change of this scale would require community review plus a hard fork. Therefore, the coming months will show how far Ethereum moves into the model Hoskinson claims as his own.

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