On Friday (September 16), Charles Hoskinson, who is Co-Founder and CEO of Input Output Global (“IOG”), the blockchain technology company behind Cardano’s R&D, expressed his disappointment with Ethereum’s staking model.
It all started on Thursday (September 15), when one Cardano fan pointed out that Kraken has recently told its users that $ETH unstaking will not be available until Ethereum has its Shanghai protocol upgrade, which is expected sometime next year.
Hoskinson then sent out a tweet that mocked Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) model by subtly noting that Cardano’s PoS design and implementation does not suffer from this problem:
IOG explained Cardano’s “liquid staking” feature in a blog post published on 28 July 2022:
“One term you may have come across is ‘liquid staking’. This refers to a problem with some other blockchains whereby the stake associated with a cryptocurrency is ‘locked’ by the staking process so cannot be used for other purposes, such as voting. This is not a problem with Cardano; the stake is always liquid. Also, there is no ‘lock in’ period before a stake becomes active or that might delay a coin being spent or used in any other way.“
Before Ethereum’s Merge upgrade took place on the mainnet on September 15, Ethereum Foundation noted on its website that after the Merge, any staked $ETH would stay locked, and withdrawals would only be possible once Ethereum has its Shanghai upgrade:
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