FIRE-ANTERVIEW WITH Joseph Lubin (CEO of Consensys and Metamask)

Hi, I'm Joseph Lubin. I work at a company called Consensys.

Oh, absolutely. We've seen volatility in crypto markets before. Essentially, we are at the end of the way the current system of the world works in terms of macro global macroeconomics and geopolitics. There's so much volatility in the world in traditional asset classes, and we've seen that in gold and silver and equities and currencies. That's because things are kind of falling apart. At the same time that things are falling apart in the old system, things are just getting started in the new system. The new system, the next economic super cycle, will involve decentralized protocols like Ethereum, like Bitcoin, and AI, and ideally they'll be well married together. When you have the dog going like this, they're volatile, and the tail of the dog, which is crypto and AI, is also just starting up and being much more volatile than the old economy. That's essentially what we're experiencing. But the difference is that they are going down and we are in a volatile way going up.

It's very early for crypto. Crypto, at least the smart contracts form of crypto on Ethereum, is 10 years old and it is a profound innovation. Satoshi invented decentralized trust and he showed the world how to make use of decentralized trust for certain aspects of money. Vitalik Buterin came along and he said, and many other people in the ecosystem said, hey, we should use this more powerful form of trust because trust is breaking down in the world. We should bring this most powerful form of trust to all the systems of the world. And so that's why Ethereum was invented, to enable programmers to have a platform for building decentralized applications, decentralized businesses, and decentralized sectors of the economy. And so we are on the upswing. In America, it was hard to operate because the previous administration was trying to kill crypto. Now that legislation is being written and crypto is already embraced around the world, we have nowhere to go but up. AI is doing amazing things for empowering people, but it's also dangerous if it becomes too centralized and too under the control of a small number of people. So the best system of the world for the next 100 years has everybody being empowered by AI by having their own AI agent that's a digital twin of them that can access all the large language models and mixture of experts, lots of different agentic systems. But I've got to have my own agent that protects me, protects my identity, and enables me to interact with AI. And so a lot of AI is going to need to be built on top of crypto rails because all the different AI agents are going to be paying each other and talking to each other on decentralized protocols. So I believe it is necessary for AI and decentralized protocols to emerge for the benefit of humanity. Otherwise, if AI remains centralized, I think we're going to be in trouble.