TLDR
- Charles Hoskinson criticized Ethereum’s native UTXO proposal.
- Toni Wahrstätter proposed native UTXOs for Ethereum payments.
- The Ethereum proposal targets about 99.8% lower permanent state use.
- Hoskinson said Cardano’s EUTXO model is being copied.
- The Ethereum UTXO idea remains a research proposal, not a mainnet upgrade.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson criticized an Ethereum research proposal for native UTXOs after Ethereum developer Toni Wahrstätter published a post on reducing permanent state growth for payment activity.
Hoskinson said Cardano’s extended UTXO model, known as EUTXO, has long addressed similar design goals. He argued that Ethereum developers avoid crediting Cardano while exploring UTXO-style ideas for account-based networks.
The exchange followed Wahrstätter’s post titled “Native UTXOs on Ethereum,” which proposed using one-shot payment objects to lower state growth. The proposal said Ethereum could reduce permanent state usage for some payment workloads by about 99.8%.
Hoskinson Says Ethereum Is Copying Cardano Ideas
Charles Hoskinson responded on X after Wahrstätter described native UTXOs as a possible improvement for Ethereum payments. He said he had worked on the topic for more than 10 years and had launched a cryptocurrency that reached third place on CoinMarketCap with millions of users.
Hoskinson wrote, “It’s literally a crime in the Ethereum inner circles to mention Cardano.” His comment questioned why Ethereum discussions on UTXO design did not directly refer to Cardano’s EUTXO model.
He also said, “EUTXO is the biggest innovation of the smart contract world and Ethereum cannot mention it as they literally try to copy it.”
Cardano uses the extended UTXO model for smart contracts, while Ethereum uses an account-based model. The two systems handle payments, state, and transaction validation in different ways.
Ethereum Proposal Seeks Lower State Growth
Wahrstätter’s proposal argued that Ethereum accounts are not ideal for one-time payments because receiving ETH or ERC-20 tokens can create persistent state. The post compared that structure with Bitcoin’s UTXO model, where a payment exists as a spendable object until used.
The proposal said Bitcoin’s design treats payments as one-shot objects that are created once, spent once, and removed from the active set. Ethereum, by contrast, keeps account and storage entries that can remain in state.
The post suggested that Ethereum could support native UTXOs without giving up accounts. Under the proposed structure, Ethereum would prove a UTXO’s existence from history while storing only a small “spent” marker in state.
Wahrstätter wrote that native UTXOs could bring permanent state use down by roughly 99.8% for payment workloads that do not need persistent state. The proposal relies on frame transactions under EIP-8141 and a vault structure for creating and spending UTXOs.
Proposal Uses History Proofs and Spent Bits
The Ethereum design would store UTXO openings in event logs and block-level roots instead of permanent account state. Each UTXO would include a source, value, recipient, and protocol-assigned index.
Spending would require proof that the UTXO was created, plus a check that it had not already been spent. The chain would keep a bitfield showing whether each UTXO index had been used.
The proposal also described self-funded and sponsored spends. A self-funded spend would let the UTXO pay its own gas, while a sponsored spend would allow a third party to pay gas and receive repayment from the UTXO.
Wahrstätter said an opcode-based design would not handle fresh recipients well because gas must be paid before execution. The frame-based model would instead declare the full transaction before settlement, allowing the protocol and sponsor to verify payment conditions.
