Hoskinson Claims Flare Attacks Cardano for Attention

Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson has accused Flare founder Hugo Phillin of leveraging Cardano's name for cheap media attention.

Philion recently took to X (formerly Twitter) to argue that Flare has surpassed Cardano in fundamental DeFi metrics despite Cardano's massive six-year head start.

Philion pointed out that Cardano, which launched in 2017, has been "trying and miserably failing" to copy Flare's strategy. He specifically expects Cardano to fall short when it comes to Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

"Cardano has far lower stats across the board in DeFi than Flare despite having a massive head start and at least at some point a vast treasury," Philion wrote.

He further claimed that Cardano will not "win BTC," claiming that Flare is positioned to dominate by creating a unified DeFi layer for bridged assets like FXRP, FBTC, and FXLM, alongside real-world assets (RWAs) and stablecoins.

"So 2022"

Hoskinson, who is well-known for fiercely defending his network against industry critics, quickly dismissed Philion’s assertions as a desperate ploy for relevance.

"Attacking Cardano to get attention and media is so 2022," Hoskinson retorted. "You need to update your marketing strategy. Maybe do TikTok reaction videos?"

Philion responded hours later, denying that his initial post was an attack. He claimed he was simply citing objective on-chain data from the analytics platform DeFi Llama.

He then took another jab at Cardano's historic development pace, sarcastically offering Hoskinson a sneak peek at Flare's future roadmap.

"Wasn’t an attack - just numbers from DeFi Llama, but if I read between the lines of your message, others were attacking Cardano in 2022 and despite that little has materially changed?" Philion mocked. "Would you like an advance copy of our 2027 strategy so you can give that a whirl too?"