Ethereum's Memory Diet Looks Suspiciously Like Cardano's Lunch 🍽️

Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter has proposed introducing elements of the UTXO model into Ethereum, a design choice that drew a sharp public response from Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson. Wahrstätter's design, published this week, treats simple payments as one-shot objects that can be verified from chain history rather than stored as permanent state entries, keeping only a single spent marker in active memory. The proposal builds on the pending Frame Transactions standard, EIP-8141, which Vitalik Buterin helped raise as a topic, and enters the Strawman discussion track. According to Wahrstätter, the approach cuts permanent state growth for payment workloads by roughly 99.8%, reducing the footprint of a new account entry from around 100 to 150 bytes to about 0.3 bytes for a native UTXO. Ethereum has long operated on an account-based system that writes a permanent state entry for the first payment to any address and must retain active balance data for every wallet, even after one-time transfers.

Cardano was built from the outset on a modified Extended UTXO model known as eUTXO, which tracks funds as individual unspent outputs and supports complex smart contracts. Hoskinson, a former Ethereum co-founder who departed the project in 2014 following a public disagreement with Buterin over the network's commercial direction, accused Ethereum developers of refusing to acknowledge his work. "It's not like I've been literally working on this topic for over 10 years of my life and launched a cryptocurrency that was number three on coinmarketcap with millions of users to deploy it. It's literally a crime in the Ethereum inner circles to mention Cardano. EUTXO is the biggest innovation of the smart contract world and Ethereum cannot mention it as they literally try to copy it," Hoskinson wrote on X on July 7, 2026. He added that the native UTXO model originated with $BTC, which uses it without smart contracts, while Cardano extended the mechanism into eUTXO to run decentralized applications.

Implementing UTXO elements on Ethereum is not straightforward, as combining two different models introduces compatibility risks for already functioning DeFi protocols. The proposal arrives as Buterin promotes his Lean Ethereum roadmap, which also targets a lighter protocol.