The founder of the smart contract platform Cardano (ADA), Charles Hoskinson, is warning that the future of Ethereum (ETH) could be in question.

In an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on his YouTube channel, Hoskinson says he doesn’t “think Ethereum will survive more than 10 to 15 years.” According to Hoskinson, Ethereum faces existential threats both from within its ecosystem and externally.

“The [Ethereum] layer-2s will continue to suckle out all of the alpha and people will start fighting and it will get harder and harder for [Ethereum co-founder] Vitalik [Buterin] to be able to hold it together through sheer force of will.

And users will gradually migrate to other places and then they’re going to get eclipsed by Bitcoin DeFi (decentralized finance). Because once that turns on, the TVL (total value locked) will be larger than Ethereum and a lot of people will start migrating in that particular direction…

…and the other thing is they’re being eaten alive by Solana and Sui and these other things.

So, brilliant project. It’s just a victim of its own success. Like MySpace [social network] or any of these other things that have a lot of network effect and momentum. BlackBerry [smartphone] is another example. But people have fundamentally different paradigms that over the long term are intrinsically superior. And they creep up on you.”

The Cardano creator says that Ethereum’s problems can be traced to three mistakes made by the founders and developers.

“The number one problem Ethereum has is that they took an easy road out where they did three things wrong.

So first off, wrong protocols. They have the wrong accounting model, they have the wrong virtual machine and they have the wrong consensus model.

All of these were self-inflicted wounds. People told them not to do it, they did it and they got where they needed to go.

Second, what they chose to do to solve these problems is put in all these weird slashing economics and layer-twos and other things and now they’re living with all of the consequences of these types of things.

And third, they really don’t have a good on-chain governance system.

So really what needs to happen is you need a parallel track with solving all those three things.”

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