Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has his eye on two major upgrades — at least one of which is slated for this year — for the Cardano network amid a recent flood of criticism over its native token and ecosystem.

“We are holding all the cards as an ecosystem,” Hoskinson said in an April 7 post on X in response to recent pessimism about the blockchain.

“We have the best path for scalability, governance, and innovation. We also have the best community,” he added in response to “all the dunking on Cardano.”

Hoskinson’s optimism was fueled mainly by the upcoming Chang hard fork, seen as one of the network’s biggest hard forks since the 2022 Vasil upgrade and slated for the second quarter of this year.

Chang is the first hard fork of the Voltaire era of Cardano’s roadmap, which will introduce the concept of community-run governance to the blockchain by enabling on-chain community consensus and allowing Cardano’s ADA (ADA) holders to use their tokens to vote on proposals.

It’s seen as enabling the network to become fully decentralized by introducing community governance.

“Chang is coming soon as measured by progress on SanchoNet.”

Throughout the rest of this year, the transition will introduce Delegate Representatives (DReps), involve a Cardano Constitution Convention event, and a Cardano community vote to ratify the first draft of the Cardano Constitution.

“Ouroboros Leios is the biggest step forward toward solving the blockchain trilemma ever,” Hoskinson added.

Ouroboros Leios is a new version of the proof-of-stake consensus model designed to increase throughput, scalability and transaction speed on Cardano while maintaining the current level of decentralization.

Hoskinson’s comments came in response to an April 7 video from Ben Armstrong — aka BitBoy — who was contemplating whether Cardano was “dead.”

He compared Cardano to Solana, Sui and Toncoin, which were “blowing up” and “killing it” in terms of users, activity and price action, whereas the numbers for Cardano were “not fantastic.”

Hoskinson argued that the crypto industry has a problem with short-term narratives.

“The problem with our industry is that we let short-term narratives and carnival barkers dominate the conversation. AI has the same issue.”

Related: Cardano refutes rumors it abandoned its scaling project Hydra

“Most hate for Cardano is emotional,” commented zenGate Global founder and CEO Daniel Friedman on X on April 8. “My decision to build on Cardano and Ergo was a business and architecture decision. Not an emotional tantrum,” he added.

Crypto Capital Venture founder and Cardano advocate Dan Gambardello suggested that the FUD was because ADA’s price was not back above $1.

“Even Cardano people who say they don’t care about price, care about price. If price was up, you wouldn’t see these comments.”

ADA prices have been lackluster this year and have actually dipped slightly since the beginning of 2024.

The coin was trading down 10% over the past seven days at $0.584 at the time of writing. It is also down 81% from its September 2021 all-time high of $3.09, according to CoinGecko.

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