The old financial system is cracking, and Ethereum is what comes next.
Joe Lubin joins The Rollup to cover the end of the trust supercycle, why the world's largest institutions are now deploying on-chain, and how MetaMask is becoming your personal money operating system.
Joe Lubin is the Co-Founder of Ethereum and Founder & CEO of Consensys, which is currentlly the leading Ethereum software company behind MetaMask, Infura, and more.
The Rollup is the convergence of legacy finance and DeFi, bringing you face-to-face with the leaders of neo finance.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:46 Entering th...
Questions asked in this interview
6
0:51... the terminology that we have when we address these larger capital allocators and businesses and as we introduce them to Ethereum and DeFi, how much should we introduce them to the culture versus just taking the vibes out of the technology?
2:53What happened over the last 500 years that has gotten to a point where the largest financial institutions in the world are now deploying onchain?
8:45I'm curious why decentralization is so important and is the current institutional meta sufficient or ultimately is this a stepping stone to a place that incorporates all of the ideals as well as the institutional pragmaticism?
14:09Looking ahead to the future, how do we navigate what this structure, this market structure could look like when we have regulated financial products right next to Beyonce tickets?
18:18First is given this trust super cycle coming to a close and this next super cycle opening, how should we prepare ourselves for this next super cycle?
20:42But she's very curious what is the SEC doing wrong?
Good to see you. We still say GM. A long time ago, I and some people were trying to extend the innovation of GM and turn it into 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. So GX, the X can be anything you want.
Well, I think that's a good context because we have been engaging and entering the institutional era of Ethereum. Some are calling it, which has been 500 years in the making based on what we were talking about backstage. And one of the things that I find myself, as you know, we have more interviews and podcasts and talk to more people that are kind of at the bridge of the space, is speaking their language, meeting them where they are. I find myself, I have to restrict myself from saying GM. I have to speak their language. You've been in the space, you've talked to people on kind of both sides of this world. Do we, do you think we should kind of change who we are, like, and some of the language and the terminology that we have when we address these larger capital allocators and businesses and as we introduce them to Ethereum and DeFi, how much should we introduce them to the culture versus just taking the vibes out of the technology?
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.
Yeah, absolutely. And this has been a long time in the making. You mentioned backstage 500 years this has been in the making. I'm curious why now? Ethereum's been around a long time now. It's resilient. There's applications that have billions of dollars. We have DeFi protocols that are among the largest banks in the world. We have, you know, these institutions that are now starting to take this seriously. What happened over the last 500 years that has gotten to a point where the largest financial institutions in the world are now deploying onchain?
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Lubin, J. (2026, March 6). Is Institutional Ethereum the End of Decentralization? | Joe Lubin [Interview transcript]. The Rollup. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/752368/
MLA
Joseph Lubin. "Is Institutional Ethereum the End of Decentralization? | Joe Lubin." The Rollup, 6 Mar. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/752368/.
BibTeX
@misc{lubin2026_752368,
author = {Joseph Lubin},
title = {Is Institutional Ethereum the End of Decentralization? | Joe Lubin},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Rollup. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/752368/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
