It says it was inspired by Ethernet, and while modern Ethernet might have some significant differences of course, what were the differences between Chaosnet and the Ethernet of the time?
On top of the hardware protocol, Chaosnet also defined the higher-level transport and session layer protocol. Applications are addressed by a name string rather than a port number; e.g. "TELNET" instead of 23. This protocol was retained when the NIC hardware was replaced with stock Ethernet.