As this feud writes next chapter, Hoskinson has a warning for Cardano builders

If there’s one thing Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t have to worry about, it’s getting snitch tagged when diverse actors building on the Bitcoin blockchain get into fights. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson who had to step in to comment on the ongoing spat between the Cardano DEX SundaeSwap and project incubator CardStarter.

A messy banana split

The public spat between the two teams building on Cardano came to a head with CardStarter filing a lawsuit against SundaeSwap on 4 February, 2022. Hoskinson expressed his disappointment that the courts were getting involved. He said,

“I guess they’re [CardStarter] asking now for even more than what they were promised – 250 million [SUNDAE tokens] or something like that. . .”

The original reported value was 150 million SUNDAE tokens. SundaeSwap, meanwhile, only wanted to offer 10 million tokens at the time.

Hoskinson lamented that the judicial process would be “horrendously expensive” and might take months to years to resolve. He also reminded “young entrepreneurs” to be more formal when negotiating commercial ventures instead of closing legal deals over social media channels.

You’re START-ing to get on my nerves

To refresh your memory, CardStarter and SundaeSwap negotiated several agreements to work together and share liquidity. However, as SundaeSwap rose while CardStarter recorded a significant loss in TVL, there were disagreements about how many SUNDAE tokens were to be set aside – and whether the two projects are even merging or not.

Previously, Hoskinson had told the two to “get your sh*t together” and opt for arbitration. But now, with legal proceedings taking place, his tone is more cautious.

For his part, crypto-researcher Max Maher tried to untangle the feud and came to a similar conclusion. He had previously noted that the two projects’ leaders were very young and questioned if they had enough experience to close the deal. Maher said,

“To me, more than anything, this highlights the lack of experience on both ends, CardStarter being pretty obvious, giving false promises on tens of millions of dollars and Sundae for not resolving these issues and having everything in writing in a contract in the first place.”

However, a key takeaway here is that the spat – though it generates bad press for Cardano – has little to do with the blockchain, its development, or Hoskinson himself.

Keep calm and ADA on

At press time, ADA was changing hands at $1.12. The coin fell by 3.34% in 24 hours but rallied by 5.06% over the past seven days. What’s more, ADA and almost all of the top 25 cryptos are still in the green.