So what is money going to become? Everything's going to be money. This is Joseph Lubin, the CEO of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum, the network that brought smart contracts and programmable money to the world. And this is Keone Han, the co-founder of Monad, a new layer 1 blockchain that's rebuilt the Ethereum virtual machine from the ground up, making it fast and affordable for real world use. Do you think you're 2x a developer or 5x a developer? For the first time in history, we sat them down in the same room to talk about money, AI, and the new MetaMask money account running on Monad. A new way to hold and spend money you actually own. What did you believe the internet was going to do to money?
We need to redecentralize the technology that we're all dependent on.
It's almost like the response to these really centralizing forces is the rise of these decentralized platforms. It's very clear that we need that. Do you guys think that traditional finance is coming onto crypto rails or is crypto redefining what traditional finance actually is?
Yeah, Monad's done an amazing job in a very short period of time of building a very rich, vibrant ecosystem. Thank you. Yeah, it means a lot coming from you and all of the work that you've done to grow the Ethereum ecosystem and being able to work with the MetaMask ConsenSys team. It's really an honor and they're a great team. They're very exacting and they feel the same way about you.
Joe, when you co-founded Ethereum more than a decade ago, what did you believe the internet was going to do to money?
What was it going to do to money? The internet had two initial fatal flaws. The web technology and the internet technology was that there was no native monetary construct and there was no native identity construct. So what ended up happening is that this amazing technology that united the world in terms of information sharing and communication in different forms didn't have really important, really fundamental ways of helping people understand who they're interacting with, helping companies understand who they're interacting with, and helping people move value. It was actually illegal to do commerce on the internet in the early days because it was a defense funded project, so that was illegal. Government was paying for it, so you couldn't commercialize that shared technology. At some point it became acceptable to start using credit cards over the web. And at no point did there ever become a really useful user centric construct for representing identity and therefore reputation systems and things like that. So what the internet and web technologies ended up supporting was essentially the business model of the 20th century, but increasingly on steroids. The business model of the 20th century was commerce: big malls, lots of product, sell lots of product to lots of people, convince lots of people that they need more product, even product that they don't really need, get in their heads, understand them better and better with the use of machine intelligence. So what ended up being built is essentially a 21st century e-commerce mall on steroids. For the first 20 something years, that was the hangover that the business model of the web essentially inherited. There never has been a native business model for the internet for the worldwide web until now, until decentralized protocol technology came alive, developed over about a decade, has scaled itself, become more usable, and is getting more and more legal. But it has introduced those two constructs: essentially native value transfer, digital scarcity, and then decentralized identity, variable claims and credentials, attestation systems, reputation systems. So we now have a lot of the primitives, the building blocks to build the native business model of the internet and of decentralized protocols. So what is money going to become? Money is everything's going to be money. In the previous economy, you didn't know where the unit economics were in many of the situations. In broadcast TV or other sorts of situations, a lot of the time you were the product. On web to social media, you are the product and you're being exploited in a number of ways. You're not being paid for your content. You're not being paid for your attention. And you're not getting adequately compensated for the damage that the polarization of society is doing to the people. The world will be tokenized. There will be utility tokens for these different protocols. The protocols will move up the stack into traditional finance and the economy. Stable coins are an important construct, an incredible construct. They're really great validation of our technology, but I also look forward to the day where tokens like Ether and Bitcoin and others that can be collateral in these CDP products and can support decentralized stable coins. I look forward to being able to have a lot more decentralized economic bandwidth so that we can grow these stable coins, properly decentralized stable coins, much bigger. Everything will be tokenized, whether it's commodities or different kinds of real world assets, and they will all be composable across lots of different kinds of networks and find their ways into vaults. MetaMask is looking forward to being a coherent user interface, a user centric user interface to the entire world of more traditional tokens like our own tokens, native utility tokens, stable coins, as well as the trad tokens and the trad economy tokens that are coming into the world. They will all be considered money because they're all essentially composed of the same technology and they're all interchangeable on the same platforms.
My generation kind of came out of 2008 and not really trusting banks, and my son's generation, he's 16, he is skipping them completely. He's using Cash App as his primary bank essentially and skipping getting a checking savings, all of these. What you're building, how much of that is a response to those changes in behaviors?
It definitely fits into the opportunities that are now available with our technology. It's not really a direct response; it's more of a natural evolution of what we've been doing since the ecosystem emerged in 2009 with Bitcoin, 2014 with Ethereum. I would think of it as the world is composed of platforms. Many of those platforms are controlled by a small set of actors. Virtually all of them are controlled by a small set of actors. Whether it's AWS or Meta Platforms or Twitter or the United States of America or Cuba, they can all deplatform you in different ways and they can all change rules or do things that reduce your opportunities and liberties. What we really set out to do was build essentially the first global credibly neutral decentralized platform with censorship resistance, rigorous censorship resistance, so that people, builders, users could add stuff to the platform in the form of content or applications and permissionlessly use the platform without fear of being deplatformed because there's no actor in the world that has sufficient capability to deplatform you without just shutting down the internet. That was the goal from a user perspective. It's all about agency. It's all about users being able to operate on this platform in the context of MetaMask or other applications and have self-custody. Fully legit unassailable agency in your financial and economic life, your social media life, your political life increasingly with decentralized organizations. If you combine that with epic levels of machine intelligence that are going to be available to anybody who's connected to the internet, where people are going to be able to level themselves up in real time, be able to access the sum total knowledge of what humanity has brought forth and best practices and access to real domain experts in virtually any domain that you can care about and want to build in, that's a recipe for a lot of people feeling pretty satisfied with how their lives are moving. That was the vision with protocols like Monad, Ethereum, some other projects in our ecosystem, and interfaces like MetaMask where we're bringing that to people essentially today.
Yeah, I like your description of the call out to platforms because I feel like especially right now there are a couple of really big platforms that are looming in the distance, OpenAI and Anthropic. I think it's just very clear that it's extremely important that we have an open economy and an open environment for developers to innovate where there's a direct relationship between users and the applications so that they're not all in super powerful walled gardens that exert control over which developers can deploy and what applications users can actually face. It feels honestly a little prescient to have the rise of decentralized platforms and the work that started in 2015 or arguably even before that in 2009 because we need that now. It's very clear that we need that. It's almost like the response to these really centralizing forces and these centralized platforms is the rise of these decentralized platforms with open access for developers and users.
Yeah, exactly. So we need to redecentralize the technology that we're all dependent on. The internet was formed. It was a beautiful place and different kinds of shared public good infrastructure created this new internet economy. The internet was open source, open protocols, open specs. The web, web one, open source, open protocols, open specs. Then in the late 90s, the money came, so e-commerce and then mobile social etc., and they were just giant financial prizes. That ethos switched to siloed walled gardens and capturing as much value as you possibly can. It's a much less collaborative environment. The hope is that with our ecosystem, the web3 ecosystem, we have already returned to open source, open specs, open protocols and lots of collaboration, composability across within networks, across networks increasingly. The idea is that web3 will redecentralize the world of information technology and that's going to be so much better for people and also very good for companies.
So in our previous conversations, you've obviously talked about the importance of decentralization and what drives you to contribute to Monad is opening up access and opportunity, better tools, better yield and more stable currencies for people. Which is honestly one of the critiques of crypto is that for the last decade this has kind of been promised and mostly has served just the people who are already fine. Why is this time different?
I think I would disagree with the premise of the question a little bit. I think that's true for two different reasons. The first one is that already there are a lot of people in emerging economies with currencies that are highly volatile or highly inflationary. Just them getting access to dollars when their local bank wouldn't offer them dollars is already a significant improvement. There's much more to be done for sure, but it's clear with the traction that's there and the value that people are getting out of stable coins, especially dollar-based stable coins right now, that there already are a lot of problems that are being addressed by crypto. But of course we want to expand the amount of value that we can deliver to the world substantially. The story is about the benefits that come from an open economy where on the one hand it's becoming faster than ever to build great products, to iterate really quickly. AI is super powerful. I'm shipping more than I have in many years because I don't have to write code anymore. I can write specs. I can iteratively talk to my cloud or talk to my codecs and get a good outline of what I want to build and ask talk to the system. The interface is very powerful. What that means is that as a crypto ecosystem, we can ship a lot faster. We can build the tools that can ultimately sit on top of this underlying base layer, but the base layer is there. Ultimately breaking down the borders between local economies and creating a global economy. That's the value prop that crypto gives. It's borderless programmable money that anyone can access and that anyone can build on. I just think that's more important than it ever has been. There's never been a better time to build because of not only this base that's here, but also the productivity that can come and the speed at which we can iterate with new tools.
Yeah. Just curious, do you think you're 2x a developer or 5x developer? Are you using loops and slashgoal and just running a whole lot of different konies? Working on different pieces of a project, is it astonishing? Is it changing your health for instance, or do you find that you need to be paying so much intense attention for longer chunks of time? What is your developer life currently?
I think rather than putting a multiplier on it, what I would say is that building with AI allows me to build things that I never could have built before because the activation energy to accomplish that was too great. For me personally, I know everyone is different. For me it's less about going into polyphasic sleep so they can constantly be waking up and checking on their agents. I think that's a little bit of AI insanity. For me it's more about the fact that there's a lot of annoying details in order to build anything. If you're trying to do any kind of data analysis, it's annoying to have to filter data or deal with weird outliers or you're doing a lot of pandas operations or numpy operations. If you're building a web app, you're worrying about higher and higher level tools that have been made available over the years like Ruby on Rails or Node.js that give you better, but you're still always worrying about a lot of low-level details, a lot of plumbing. The thing that AI really gives is the fact that you can ask for a plan, you can review the plan, fix the things that are wrong, have it build something, ask AI to explain what it built and what things are non-trivial, you can go back and iterate. It's a very fast loop with the programmer in the middle of it making sure that it's not going off the rails, that it's building the right thing. My personal work is less like running 20 different agents all working on 20 different things because I'm not doing things that are experiment. For me it would be more like I think I know what I want the thing to look like but then I need to constantly look back at what it is decided and make sure that it's doing the right thing. At the end of a couple of hours I could produce something that would have taken me several weeks to do, and because it would have taken me several weeks I never would have gotten to it at all.
Yeah. So my current thesis is that we're going to need so many capable humans in so many more loops. It's sort of what you're describing that there will always be human need driving this activity and human sense making and nudging and creativity and just making sure the right thing has been built.
Just like any other time in history where humans are doing something very labor intensive and then a machine comes along that could do that, you're just doing the next higher level thing and you're increasing. We're moving up the stack.
Yeah. I just think it would be very hard to imagine building factories on Mars and full terraforming systems and interstellar travel far beyond that, all these other things if we don't massively amplify our own individual productivity.
It seems like it's also moving exponentially. Like what you're doing two months ago is different than how you're using it today.
Only infinite more orders of magnitude to go and we'll get to the godhead.
For years, people have been talking about traditional finance coming onto the blockchain and it seems like this year more and more it is actually happening. But do you guys think that traditional finance is coming onto crypto rails or is web3 and crypto redefining what traditional finance actually is?
Both. ConsenSys essentially has two major focuses. One is MetaMask, a self-custody neo bank, user centric, full financial services. And then we do protocols work in the Ethereum ecosystem, the Linea ecosystem, the Besu private permissioned ecosystem. That group is doing what we call our institutional work. We're working with major financial institutions, FMIs, hubs of the financial industry. They've been using private permissioned Ethereum for a number of years. We contributed our Besu execution layer client to the Linux Foundation, decentralized trust. It was called Hyperledger back then. There are approaching a hundred very significant Besu installations around the world. City token services is a big business that runs on Besu. BNY and DTCC and lots of other organizations use the technology. We're looking to bring those networks more closely into the broader Ethereum ecosystem with the use of zero knowledge proof technology. You can imagine that the extended EVM or Ethereum ecosystem will have lots of networks including Monad that are significantly composable, synchronously composable with activity on different networks. There's the stuff that they're doing already which is positioned on decentralized rails or quasi decentralized rails, and our institutional group is a protocols group. We're actually moving up the stack and we are in design work and contemplation work of working with some of these financial institutions because many of them want to turn some of what they do into protocols. That's the other piece where they recognize the value of minimizing trust, setting up federated networks, federating networks that can get more and more decentralized, having foundations even at the heart of these consortia or next generation consortia. That's about reimagining how things that happen today or that can't even happen today will happen on quasi decentralized systems or eventually very decentralized systems.
You've been more recently talking to a lot of different tradFi companies and stuff. What have you been hearing in those meetings?
I think one thing that really jumps out is the importance. They do really care about decentralization. They do really care about trust minimization. For all of us in the crypto space, what we should understand decentralization to mean to the broader world is that it means you don't have to worry about a single counterparty, having to trust a single counterparty. It is really about having an open permissionless layer that is not just controlled by one party, where the control of the network is highly decentralized. That's what gives a robust foundation for a lot more to be built upon. That's really something that has jumped out for me when I've had conversations with folks at some of the places that you mentioned or others. They don't want to build in a centralized environment. They don't want to build in a place where there's a single anchor tenant that is like a publicly traded company. They care a lot about decentralization. There are very few networks that really satisfy that. Ethereum is very much their top choice because it's very decentralized and very secure. It's been running for many years with perfect uptime. The reliability, decentralization, and trust minimization are what keeps jumping out. I think other blockchains should really think about being much more Ethereum like because that is a quality that's really valued by a lot of these counterparties.
Yeah. TradFi has been innovating for about 400 years. They've encountered a lot of shenanigans, a lot of issues, a lot of problems. We live in a world that has put behind us so much unhealthy financial infrastructure. There's still a lot left to put behind us. But it's pretty remarkable in western liberal democratic financial markets. The American financial ecosystem is so deep and so liquid and so reliable, it services a lot of companies and a lot of people very well. Yet they recognize that our technology, decentralized protocol technology, whether it's rigorously maximally decentralized in the Ethereum layer 1 context or sufficiently decentralized in other contexts. The modularity of the EVM ecosystem with layer 2s and private permission networks and layer 1 networks are beautiful design primitives for different kinds of use cases that want sufficient security, sufficient decentralization or credible neutrality, and maybe not too much censorship resistance in some situations because there are rule books and laws that lots of these institutions have to follow as they're building infrastructure. We're going to see a diverse world of different configurations. Ethereum layer 1, I believe, will be the gold standard of credible neutrality and censorship resistance. It'll support lots of networks to connect to it in various different ways with different mechanisms. To the extent that it's useful, all of these networks will be able to compose activity and liquidity via different kinds of mechanisms. There are asynchronous mechanisms available currently, and synchronous composability across lots of different chains is coming online soon.
So we're here because of a new money account. For anybody that is just hearing about it for the first time, what is it?
It's the idea that MetaMask has evolved from being a signing tool to a lightweight wallet to a more sophisticated portfolio manager. A lot of organizations are moving in the direction of providing full financial services. A lot of those organizations, fintechs or banks or others, are going to do it from their own particular perspective. It is my bias that in the traditional economy there is essentially always an adversarial relationship between the corporation and their consumers or users, their customers. It's about making as much money as possible from their customers while surrendering as little expensive value as possible. That's an extreme statement and some strategies where you do your best to give your customers as much value as possible are certainly being pursued by traditional companies. But in our world of decentralized protocols, recognizing that it is the user on web3 that has the agency, that this is a user centric worldwide web, we need to build a financial product that is saturated with that ethos. So it's your ability to use stable coins, use debit cards. The MetaMask debit card can make payments in crypto, in stable coins at hundreds of millions of Mastercard merchants worldwide. When I saw that number, I was like can't be hundreds of millions, but it's hundreds of millions of merchants around the world. It's the kind of situation that you don't have to think about. You can onboard and on ramp and off ramp money. You can make payments. You can be assured that your money is always being put in the best yielding situation automatically. Some banks sweep money from a checking account to a saving account overnight. This is earning yield at all times. If you want to trade, if you want to engage in prediction markets, it's also just one click. It's all sitting there. It's an effortless way to feel sure that your money is being treated as well as possible by the tool that you rely on.
