Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin on the inevitability of Ethereum

UpOnly: Chats with Crypto Experts

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Show Notes

Introduction

⁃ Joe co-founded Ethereum and ConsenSys

⁃ Worked in robotics, machine vision, AI. Moved into the financial space and became depressed by that, the economy and geopolitics. Saw centralised systems as bankrupt politically and financially

⁃ Read the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2011. Met Vitalik in Toronto in 2014 and read the Ethereum whitepaper that night and it became clear it was the way to build a system better, faster and more expressive than on Bitcoin

⁃ Web3 vision resource: polynya.medium.com also /u/liberosist on Reddit

⁃ Vitalik did a great job of setting an intellectually honest tone of integrity along with the power of the ideas held them together vs differing opinions

Metamask

⁃ Metamask has a decentralised future ahead of it (Token confirmed?!)

⁃ Metamask is already an ecosystem and it will be more explicitly an ecosystem

NFTs

⁃ Astonishing to see how many people are affected by the NFT phenomenon. Major crossing of the chasm – use of the technology without a real understanding of the underlying

⁃ Cobie: It converted a lot more people but it’s also there is huge hostility to NFTs starting with the climate narrative

⁃ Joe: People with entrenched or vested interest trying to slow things down. Can’t worry too much about naysayers, try to stay patient and educate

⁃ Ethereum and others have a solution for the energetically expensive PoW. Bitcoin energy burning is almost a religion but with renewable energy they may be able to stay the course

Institutions and CBDCs

⁃ Multiyear agreements with financial institutions to enable Ethereum technology

⁃ NFT pipeline is also really big for projects right now

⁃ Regulation and liquidity along with matured technology the movement will be unstoppable

⁃ Nation state money is declining, looks like the end of a 80 year debt supercycle moving into a new era

⁃ Cobie: Governments have realised this, spinning up CBDCs per country. Not sure what they mean by it but they’ve accepted using these systems as the future

⁃ Joe: Depends on the country, China CBDC won’t be very decentralised. CBDCs will take a long time to figure out, don’t want to mess with systems billions rely on. ConsenSys have worked on multiple CBDC projects

⁃ Real time economy would shrink the duration between value creation events and be a growth driver for the economy

Multichain

⁃ Seen a multichain future for a long time

⁃ Security is dominated by BTC and ETH. More projects are focused on Execution

⁃ Alt L1s are more like competitors to Ethereum L2s

⁃ Solana are spending a huge about for security, fees are an order of magnitude less than what they’re paying. May look to ETH rollups in future for a solution

⁃ Ethereum has a massively unfair advantage with the size and speed of the development of the ecosystem

⁃ Cobie: How does Ethereum retain the ability to make changes while people become more reliant on it?

⁃ Joe: Not a new problem, Vitalik and others have spoken about simplifying the lower layers. Need to continue to improve the chain and sharding. Can see Palm as an ETH L2, Gnosis as a L2 and L3

Memes & New Economy

⁃ Everything is a meme now

⁃ Budweiser tweeting gm and wagmi

⁃ Moving from a previous economy which is very physical to an economy that is essentially all about creativity and living in virtual worlds

⁃ Things are going to get wacky and interesting in a creativity economy

MEV

⁃ Didn’t specifically think of MEV back in the day but recognised fee mechanisms would have sophistication come to it

⁃ Wallet Extractable Value is also being paid attention to

⁃ Continually evolving set of systems designed to make communities, users and organisations happy with given choices. End up paying the users of the system out of the MEV

Identity

⁃ Wallet is your digital authority

⁃ MetaMask moving towards enabling increasingly granular security

⁃ Able to have multiple personas and bring them together e.g. personas may need to be brought together for a better loan

⁃ Identity has been worked on from the start by ConsenSys and others from the start

⁃ As DAOs become increasingly politically important there will be a forum in which identity starts to ramify significantly

⁃ Thought DIDs would have been adopted quickly but it’s a deep set of problems

Final Alpha

⁃ Be kind to the people around you, take care of them

Notes by Kevin and Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle