Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson Defies Critics and Politics Amid Treasury Controversy
Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano and a co-founder of Ethereum. He's known for building Cardano on peer-reviewed research and speaking bluntly.
Hoskinson's career has three stages: studying mathematics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder, where he attended from 2005 to 2011; being one of five original Ethereum founders in late 2013, which he left in 2014 after a dispute over whether the project should be commercial or nonprofit; and co-founding IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), the engineering and research firm behind Cardano with Jeremy Wood.
Cardano runs on Ouroboros, a proof-of-stake protocol where block producers are chosen by the ADA delegated to them. This makes it the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol based on peer-reviewed research. IOHK has sponsored blockchain research at various universities, including the University of Edinburgh, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Wyoming.
Cardano's governance system moved to on-chain voting with the Chang hard fork in 2024. Three groups now vote: delegated representatives (DReps), who vote with power assigned by ADA holders; stake pool operators (SPOs), who run the servers; and a seven-member Constitutional Committee, which checks that actions follow Cardano's constitution.