By this time last year, Alex Saunders had claimed that Cardano (ADA) would not be able to add smart contract functionality onto its blockchain by July 2021. Charles Hoskinson’s old tweet where he had boldly claimed that not only would his project be able to have hundreds of different assets be running seamlessly on Cardano, but that thousands of dApps would also be implemented as well as adding more utility and use cases, has not exactly aged all that well in the eyes of numerous skeptics. Many claims that Charles has failed to deliver on his promises thus far and that he only has a little bit of time left to do so as his deadline draws closer.
Right now, Alonzo is still very much in the testnet phase, which had also led Alex to conclude that compared to Cardano, Ethereum (ETH) is the superior choice, even going as far as to say that it is currently ‘100 times ahead of its respective competitors’.
The question still remains as to whether Hoskinson will be able to deliver on his promises or if he shall fail to adhere to his own deadline.
Cardano is ‘not quite there yet
One of the main reasons as to why Charles has made his claim in 2020 was because of Shelley’s successful launch, through which PoS (proof-of-stake) had been added to Cardano. Since then, however, progress has been relatively slow for Cardano, with only a couple of the ‘thousands of dApps’ actually managing to record more than 10K transactions per month.
Alex, for his part, did say that he is not actively working against Cardano, quite the opposite in fact. He supports Hoskinson’s project and has even admitted to holding ADA. However, he strongly believes that such ambition put forth by Charles is certainly impressive, albeit a bit unrealistic. Alex states that Charles will not be able to accomplish the goals he set out for himself a year ago and that it will actually take up to 5 more years to achieve such a feat. He then added that there is not much familiarity with Cardano comparative to Ethereum as far as most investors are concerned.
Charles fights back
As part of his response, Charles simply pointed out that the idea that Cardano has not made any kind of substantial progress since this time last year is completely ludicrous, before adding that the so-called experts who keep criticizing Cardano have just not been paying close enough attention.
Ultimately, Charles believes in Cardano and what it can do for the DeFi ecosystem and says that although it might take longer than expected, it is nevertheless a viable project when it comes to scalability, accountability, repeatability, iteration, and testing. He, therefore, concluded that there is currently no other project that is as thorough as Cardano.