In this episode, one of crypto’s most influential leaders joins Cobie & Ledger to discuss the entire Ethereum ecosystem. Joseph Lubin co-founded Ethereum and then created ConsenSys, one of the largest and most prominent crypto product companies around.
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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
Music by GiovanniPickle