Cardano founder and Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson has come under the scanner for allegedly falsifying his educational background. This is after crypto-journalist Laura Shin uncovered some significant facts about Hoskinson and his credentials in her recent book “The Cryptonians”.
Through her book and several allegations made on social media, Shin claimed Hoskinson neither finished an undergraduate degree nor did he enrol for a PhD.
Responding to the allegations, Hoskinson took to Twitter to refute the claims made in the book, calling it a “great work of fiction”. However, Shin hit back, stating that Charles has made false claims regarding his level of education.
She tweeted, “speaking of fiction, do you want to address the discrepancies between your claims of dropping out of a PhD program and the schools’ assertions that you were enrolled as an undergrad?”
Hoskinson has publicly stated that he had completed his undergraduate program in Number Theory at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) and the Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSUD).
However, Shin’s research uncovered that Hoskinson joined the Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSUD) to study maths part-time from 2006-08. He later enrolled with the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB) in 2009-11 for an undergraduate course. After contacting both universities, Shin learned that “MSUD doesn’t have a graduate math program”, and Hoskinson never completed his course at UCB.
“The Cryptonians” revisits the early days of Ethereum and paints a vivid picture of the power conflict between the leading stakeholders of the project. “Sparks flew as these outsized personalities fought for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity,” Shin writes.
Hoskinson’s departure from Ethereum is told in varying accounts. Some believed that he was responsible for his own ouster after going head-to-head with co-founder Vitalik Buterin regarding investment strategies, which led to his bitter exit.
While Hoskinson thought that Venture Capital (VC) funding should’ve been the way forward, Buterin insisted on keeping Ethereum a not-for-profit project.
After his departure, Hoskinson also shed light on his fall out with Buterin saying, “It became a Lord of the Flies — style situation, where power camps were formed and whoever was most persuasive to Vitalik was the one who won. That’s why there’s some bad blood, that’ why I wasn’t the nicest guy on the exit. My Reddit postings weren’t so happy.”
Cardano’s ADA token showed signs of sluggish recovery just before March 6, when Shin posted the accusations. Although the token did not show increased volatility on that day, it continued to plunge as the news spread across the globe. ADA has lost over 12 percent over the last seven days and was trading down nearly 4 percent at $0.8 at the time of writing.
