Key takeaways
- Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has proposed native UTXOs that could reduce permanent state usage by 99.8%.
- Charles Hoskinson said the proposal uncreditedly copies Cardano’s decade-old EUTXO model.
- The proposal remains in the research phase, and no formal Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) has yet been filed.
New Ethereum proposal reignites old feud
Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, published a proposal introducing native unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) as unique payment objects on Ethereum, meaning the objects would only exist temporarily rather than creating permanent account records. Wahrstätter wrote that the model could reduce persistent state usage by about 99.8% for payment workloads that don’t require persistent state, a significant efficiency gain for a network that has struggled with long-term state overload.
The proposal builds on Ethereum’s upcoming Frame Transactions standard, EIP-8141, and aligns with co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s Lean Ethereum Roadmap, an initiative aimed at simplifying the network’s architecture and slowing state growth. The proposal remains in the research phase and no formal Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) has been filed.
Hoskinson responded quickly, arguing that the concept reflects the work that Cardano has spent about a decade developing. He also noted earlier this month:
It’s literally a crime in Ethereum’s inner circles to mention Cardano. EUTXO is the biggest innovation in the world of smart contracts and Ethereum can’t mention it because they are literally trying to copy it.
Cardano’s extended UTXO model extends Bitcoin’s original UTXO transaction structure to support smart contracts, an approach Hoskinson has long argued provides more predictable transaction execution than Ethereum’s account-based model. He said the Cardano team published a paper called “Chimeric Ledgers” explaining how to run UTXO-based systems and account-based systems in parallel, work he said predates Ethereum’s current proposal by several years.
Hoskinson argued that deterministic transactional behavior, i.e. transactions that execute the same way regardless of network conditions, remains one of Cardano’s most important competitive advantages. He said predictable execution reduces unexpected outages, minimizes network congestion, and creates a more secure foundation for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
Part of a larger pattern this month
Hoskinson repeatedly criticized Ethereum’s architecture and governance throughout July, arguing that Ethereum lacked an on-chain treasury capable of sustainably funding long-term development. He has also used recent public appearances to defend Cardano’s slower, research-driven development philosophy against critics who say the network has moved too cautiously since its 2017 launch.
Hoskinson argues that Cardano’s true competitive advantage lies less in any single feature than in its overall engineering philosophy, arguing that competitors can copy individual technical ideas but cannot easily replicate Cardano’s research-driven culture.
In any case, the technical disagreement carries real stakes for both ecosystems, because if Ethereum successfully implements a native UTXO model (significantly reducing its state growth), the network would address one of its longest-standing scaling criticisms, while potentially undermining one of Cardano’s key differentiators. Ethereum developers did not directly respond to Hoskinson’s copying allegations, and Wahrstätter’s proposal did not credit Cardano’s EUTXO work in its public documentation.
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