Cardano’s Hoskinson Renews Solana Rivalry as Breakpoint Event Approaches

• A lighthearted exchange on X between Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson and some members of the crypto community has revived the underlying animosity between ADA and Solana.
• Hoskinson has often stated that he wants to make Cardano faster and more decentralized than Solana, which he has often criticized for its unreliability.

There are a few crypto leaders more outspoken or controversial than Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano. Hoskinson is almost always feuding with users of other chains, from Bitcoin to Ethereum, despite co-founding the latter. His latest target is Solana, one of the chains he has set as a target for Cardano to eclipse.

It started with lighthearted banter that was kicked off by Alex Svanevik, the founder of the on-chain analytics platform Nansen, who shared a fake article on a Solana ecosystem member being busted with condoms in Singapore en route to the Solana Breakpoint event, which kicked off on Friday.

this is like smuggling 20,000 steaks to a vegan festival pic.twitter.com/rMJs9ApqdF

— Alex Svanevik (@ASvanevik) September 15, 2024

The crypto community, eager as ever to engage in online banter, was quick to chip in, including Hoskinson, who slyly took a shot at Solana.

He just wanted to safely use Solana https://t.co/AzDfu28mb5

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 16, 2024

While all this was done in jest, Hoskinson followed up by implying that Cardano could soon eclipse Solana’s infrastructure and technology.

It started with a community poll seeking to gauge the ADA community’s reception to two proposed improvements: Rust Node and Ouroboros Leios. The former suggests building a Rust node requirement while the latter is a variant of Ouroboros focused on increasing throughput, “while achieving at least as good security properties as previous Ouroboros variants.”

In a poll on X, a majority of the Cardano community leaned towards Leios at 55%, with 17% choosing both. Hoskinson was among those calling for Leios, and in his response, he couldn’t resist pulling Solana into the conversation:

The rust node gives us no new differentiating features for users. Leios makes us faster than Solana without losing decentralization…

The rust node gives us no new differentiating features for users. Leios makes us faster than Solana without losing decentralization…

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 15, 2024

Hoskinson vs. Everybody

It’s not the first time Hoskinson has taken shots at Solana. One of the low-hanging fruits for him has been Solana’s history of outages. Despite being one of the largest blockchain networks in the world, worth $61 billion, Solana has recorded quite a few outages, most recently in February, which lasted five hours. The one before February’s had lasted 17 hours.

Hoskinson took a shot at these outages last year, stating:

The fact that Cardano has never failed in 5 years, it’s always been running 24 hours a day 7 days a week, it’s become effectively the root of trust of the entire cryptocurrency space there is no engine better-there is no code better than what we’ve written.

This always works https://t.co/5kVRVGFM4l pic.twitter.com/X9yJXcETQn

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) February 6, 2024

Meanwhile, ADA trades at $0.3342, dipping slightly over the past day for a $12 billion market cap, placing it just outside the top ten tokens.