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Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founder, pushed back strongly against claims that Cardano had “abandoned scaling in favor of governance.”
According to him, the network’s scaling roadmap involved years of scientific research, experimentation, and engineering work rather than short-term fixes designed merely to increase transaction throughput quickly.
“Scalability research has remained a core focus of Cardano’s development strategy since the project’s early years, long before the launch of the Shelley era,” he stated.
Additionally, Hoskinson emphasized that Cardano pursued a research-based approach to develop blockchain technology. He pointed to several technologies and initiatives that formed part of the network’s long-term scaling efforts, including layer-2 solutions, the Extended Unspent Transaction Output (eUTXO) accounting model, partner chains and zero-knowledge cryptography research.
The executive also highlighted the significance of Leios, Cardano’s proposed high-performance scaling architecture, as a critical part of the ecosystem’s future infrastructure. Using Peras and Cardano’s broader layer-2 approach, he explained the blockchain’s future-proof design as part of its long-term growth strategy.
 
According to him, many of these innovations required original publications and extensive academic research before implementation begun. He highlighted that adding more developers was not an effective way to speed up the work, stating that deep scientific problems can only be resolved with sufficient time.
His remarks came in response to community members who believed Cardano should have prioritized rapid scalability upgrades over governance development through Voltaire, the blockchain’s governance-focused era.
Meanwhile, Hoskinson defended the move towards Voltaire, maintaining that decentralized governance was essential for strengthening the ecosystem and enabling future scaling of the network.
His explanation is that these governance mechanisms allow the community to directly participate in decisions regarding parameter changes, protocol upgrades, and treasury management, as well as in client diversity.
Under the Voltaire framework, ADA holders can vote on network proposals and treasury allocations through decentralized representatives, commonly referred to as DReps. Hoskinson argued that implementing governance before scaling upgrades ensures that future changes to the blockchain are driven by the community rather than a centralized authority.
Furthermore, he claimed that abandoning governance in favor of aggressive scalability efforts would have undermined Cardano’s decentralized vision.
“A semi-centralized and not secure halfway house could have been implemented that crashed all the time like other blockchains. Or we could do it right, like we’ve always done things with the Cardano ecosystem. We chose the latter,” he wrote.
In his view, rushing incomplete solutions to market could have resulted in a less secure and unstable blockchain ecosystem, similar to problems experienced by some competing networks.
Beyond governance, Hoskinson reiterated that Cardano’s development philosophy has consistently prioritized security, formal verification, and long-term sustainability over rapid deployment cycles. That approach has often drawn criticism from traders and developers seeking faster ecosystem expansion, particularly as rival blockchains aggressively pursued scalability and decentralized finance adoption.
However, supporters of Cardano argue that the network’s methodical approach could position it more favorably over the long term, especially if its scaling technologies successfully deliver higher throughput without sacrificing decentralization or security.