Charles Hoskinson is an American entrepreneur who is a co-founder of the blockchain company Input Output Global, Inc. (formerly IOHK) and the Cardano blockchain platform. He was also a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain platform.
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Charles Hoskinson's Biography
Charles Hoskinson is a mathematician and technology entrepreneur from Colorado. He is most well-known as the co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of Cardano. Both of these networks are among the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world. He is also the CEO and founder of IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), the company behind the Cardano blockchain. Hoskinson began his career in blockchain with Bitshares and Ethereum, but after some disagreements about the vision, he left Ethereum. His current pursuit of fame is Cardano and its parent company IOHK. Cardano is a blockchain that directly competes with Ethereum. What makes Cardano unique is its scientific foundation. Hoskinson often interacts with the crypto community through YouTube.
Charles's Career
Hoskinson received his education from two universities:
- Metropolitan State University;
- University of Colorado in Boulder, "to study analytic number theory before transitioning to cryptography through industry influence."
Prior to Cardano, his professional experience included two blockchain-related startups, including the innovation Invictus (the company behind Bitshares) and Ethereum. He developed Bitshares in 2013, which was an early decentralized exchange platform. In the same year, he founded an online school called the "Bitcoin Education Project," where he met Vitalik Buterin, and together with a few co-founders, they started Ethereum. Although Hoskinson was initially the CEO of Ethereum, he didn't stay with the company for long and left the project in June 2014 following a dispute about whether the project should be commercial (according to Hoskinson) or non-commercial (according to Buterin).
Afterward, he was approached by Jeremy Wood, a former colleague from Ethereum. Together with Jeremy, Hoskinson launched his own blockchain project called Input Output (IOHK), an independent development company that creates blockchains for academic institutions. Currently, he is the CEO of IOHK, and its mission is to provide financial services to over 3 billion people worldwide who lack a transparent and fair financial and managerial system. The most prominent project of IOHK is Cardano, a blockchain and smart contract platform that uses its own cryptocurrency called ADA.
The Cardano Project
IOHK is a company that creates cryptocurrencies and blockchains for corporations, academic institutions, or government entities. It has a diverse, geographically distributed team of engineers, scientists, business professionals, and open-source contributors. The primary responsibilities of the foundation involve overseeing the development of Cardano and its ecosystem.
Under Hoskinson's leadership, IOHK began working on the Cardano blockchain, which is its flagship project and has its coin, ADA. Cardano conducted an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in 2017 and raised $63 million for its ADA token. In September 2017, IOHK launched the Cardano blockchain, and ADA quickly started gaining value. By January 2018, it had reached a market capitalization of $32 million, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency. This achievement solidified Cardano's position as a significant competitor to Ethereum in the market.
Although Cardano is very similar to Ethereum in this regard, it is designed as a network for smart contracts and dapps, Hoskinson's vision for Cardano was a little different. He wanted it to be built on a solid scientific and mathematical foundation. Cardano itself is named after the famous Italian mathematician of the 16th century, Gerolamo Cardano. Similarly, parts of its ecosystem are also named after famous historical figures, such as Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, Matsuo Basho, Voltaire, and many others. For security purposes, IOHK chose Haskell as Cardano's programming language. Haskell is a very secure programming language because it provides certain methods of safe coding and is widely used in industries such as finance and defense contracting.
In 2017, IOHK sponsored several blockchain technology labs worldwide, including the University of Edinburgh, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the University of Wyoming. This led to the Ouroboros blockchain consensus protocol. To help Cardano scale and achieve optimal performance, IOHK developed Ouroboros. This protocol combines proof-of-stake consensus efficiency with the security of Bitcoin mining.
