Cardano’s Hoskinson Doubles Down on Moving Slow

Pointing to Terra’s collapse, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson reaffirms why we need to slow down in crypto.

There has been a popular mantra followed by many in the cryptocurrency space that goes along the lines of needing to “move fast and break things,” when dealing with technology as revolutionary and impactful as blockchain.

Crypto has, indeed, been moving fast, and a lot has been broken. With seemingly endless hacks, exploits, rug pulls, project failures, and Terra’s monumental collapse, Charles Hoskinson reconfirms his stance on why crypto projects should move slowly and ensure that they get things right the first time, so people stop losing money and confidence in the crypto sector.

Popular projects such as Ethereum and Solana notably follow this moving fast mantra. The result has been projects and products being quick to market, but experiencing issues that plague the crypto community such as atrociously high network fees, and in the case of Solana, multiple network outages.

Projects that take a more educational, peer-reviewed, and research-based approach are the likes of Cardano and Algorand, who act more like the tortoise than the hare in the fabled race between the two.

These projects have come under scrutiny from impatient investors and users as they have been slower in their development and release to market, but with the aim of theoretically producing a more robust network that should see fewer issues than their rushing competitors.

In a recent interview with Coindesk, Hoskinson pointed out why we need to be more careful stating:

“If you move too quickly, as we’ve seen with Luna, and we’ve seen with $10.5 billion of hacks last year, you could actually get it to work until it doesn't, and then when it doesn’t it’s a catastrophic failure and everybody loses their money”

In contrast, Hoskinson said that he and his company IOG (formerly IOHK) are moving deliberately in building the Cardano network playing the “long arc game,” measured not in weeks or months, but in years to decades.

“We always say it’s not first, it’s best out of the gate who succeeds,” Hoskinson said. “The people who are going to survive are those who are tested under stress and exhibit resiliency.”

Hoskinson’s Cardano project is one of the most closely watched in the industry, amassing vast amounts of attention from retail and institutional investors alike partly thanks to Grayscale's Smart Contract Platform Fund. Earlier this year, Grayscale launched an Ethereum alternative fund that houses Polkadot, Algorand, and Solana, with the largest weighting going to Cardano at 25.35%

Hoskinson is also one of the highly anticipated speakers who will be attending Consensus 2022 in Texas this June.