Fireside Chat: Consensys' Joe Lubin | Robbie Klages - The Rollup & Joe Lubin - Consensys

Hey everyone. Hey Robbie.

A long time ago, I and some people were trying to extend the innovation of GM and turn it into GX because we were going GM, GA, GN, etc. And so I started doing GX where X is a variable that can stand for anything. And so we're trying to get it to catch on globally, and we're still working on it. GX. The X can be anything you want.

So I think it's always valuable and important to understand who you're speaking to, what their mental models might be of the world, and to do your best to communicate in terms that are more effective for them to understand what you're trying to communicate. That said, when we talk to different kinds of financial institutions, and we're doing that quite a lot, they're really smart, they're really savvy. A lot of them have been doing the work for the last 10 plus years to understand our technology and our ecosystem. I wouldn't walk into a meeting and say GM or GX. But in terms of talking about the intricate details of our technology, we can go there, and there are good reasons why they're paying a huge amount of attention to what we're doing.

So I like to think of what we've been doing in our ecosystem as both revolutionary and evolutionary. So we essentially, with Bitcoin and Ethereum and the growing metropolitan Ethereum ecosystem and other protocols that are trying to do similar things, we've been speedrunning the last 500 years of innovation in traditional finance. And so some of those things include just how do we form pools of capital, bigger pools of capital so that we can share risk and do much bigger things. So joint stock corporations and bonds, nation states issuing bonds to do really big infrastructural things. And so that category is like how do you do big things? How do you coordinate things and how do you ensure that the claims that people have are respected or trusted and how do you make them more efficient to trade and things like that. And there are other innovations like wiring funds. Western Union pioneered that and trade finance mechanisms, bills of lading, and you can go all the way to innovations in options and ATMs and stuff like that. And so these fall into categories. Scaling trust is a category that's really important. So far we've only been able to scale centralized trust in the world. Pricing risk, sharing risk, settlement, fast settlement, fast dissemination of information. And all those things are things that we've been doing an incredible job on in our ecosystem. So why now? We're at the end of a super cycle and there's been a loss of trust in centralized institutions. The world has been, or society has been built on institutional trust and institutional trust has been lost in the last few decades. So we're at the end of this super cycle. The world is cracking up in different ways and along comes Satoshi Nakamoto and invents this most profound new form of trust, decentralized trust. And a lot of people say, 'Wow, we're engineers. We can take this new form of decentralized trust which Satoshi showed us how to operationalize in Bitcoin and we can apply it to all the systems of the world.' And so we built this new foundational trust platform. Ethereum makes it available to all sorts of software engineers. We've been building DeFi to build really efficient, effective financial rails for the decentralized emerging global economy. And now we've scaled it. We've made it affordable, usable. The United States of America was trying to make it illegal for a while under the previous administration, but now it's getting more and more legal. And now organizations, enterprises, financial institutions can tokenize instruments. The stablecoin phenomenon is going big. Tokenized deposits. Companies can make use of DeFi and so the technology is now scalable and usable enough and we're getting essentially gale force winds in our sails from regulators and legislators in the United States and that's going to be great. It's going to be great for people. This ecosystem, this technology is all about empowering people and communities. It's all about making sure that people and organizations have economic, social, political, financial agency in their lives. And so we need decentralized trust. We need decentralized rails. Decentralization enables censorship resistance. Enables credible neutrality of platforms so that you can't get deplatformed. And I guess the final piece is self-custody of your assets. And so if we can land all that and if we can do it in our own ecosystem which has gone really well for 10 plus years and if we can now do it from inside the existing bigger financial ecosystem because they really do appreciate our technology, then I think we will have achieved what many of us early in the Ethereum ecosystem wanted to achieve which was to enable decentralized trust to permeate the whole world.