Joe Lubin Says the Biggest Crypto Bull Market Is Still Coming

Having machine intelligence rebalance their portfolio or do programmatic trading for them. But a lot of people don't really trust that they're making stuff up. They're not trustworthy. At the end of the year, I think we'll see a huge amount of genetic activity on chain. It became clear that there were a lot of machine intelligences that were making use of MetaMask. And so, obviously it was humans who were setting up agents and doing various different kinds of trading. And we believed that the hybrid human machine intelligence economy, the agentic economy, the machine to machine economy is going to grow really dramatically, and is going to come upon us very quickly. And we felt that it was really important to enable the humans to feel comfortable that they're going to be able to use their machine intelligences to do things that they're uniquely suited to. And also they wouldn't have to sacrifice security when they're providing access to their MetaMask or the agent's own MetaMask. Agents are incredible. The big centralized machine intelligences are really incredible these days, but you really can't be certain that they're not going to have their memory compacted and they're going to forget that you told them not to stay within their allowance or something like that. So what we've done is we've taken our delegation framework, delegation toolkit, and we've created a MetaMask agent wallet. It's a command line interface currently. And we've made it impossible for the agent to do something that the human has indicated is not within the policy of acceptable behavior.

We were surprised at how many agents were actually using MetaMask. So I think it's partly tooling. It's partly feeling safe. Like a lot of people talk about having machine intelligence rebalance their portfolio or do programmatic trading for them, but a lot of people don't really trust that. And partly the issue is that if you're just a naive individual and you ask a machine intelligence to write a PhD dissertation on quantum mechanics, the really good ones can come up with something that looks very professional, that looks incredible. If you're a naive observer, but if you're an actual quantum physicist, you can tell when the thing is just making stuff up. You can tell where the holes are in the analysis or the argument. And so these things are incredible. They're going to get better and better, but they're really stochastic word and idea predictor machines and they're making stuff up. And the fact is, there's just so much intelligence, wisdom, etc., in all of what humanity has emitted and put on the internet and put in books. And so we're seeing a lot of that replayed back to us by these machine intelligences and their reasoning mechanisms and their reinforcement learning that helps them be better and better. But they're not trustworthy on their own right now. And so that's why the agentic wallet is essential.

Yeah, it's an incredible tool. It is. And the pace at which it's improving is also remarkable. But you'll also, I mean, it's almost a meme at this point where you'll get a, I say, oh, good catch. It was good for you to push back on that. I was wrong in retrospect. So you see that sort of stuff all the time.

I don't know. It's just nice to have. So it could be that there's a newer protocol that isn't whitelisted in our system yet. Yet the individual human trader knows exactly what it is. And so we don't want to restrict anybody from using DEXs or prediction markets or LP into some fun new project. And so just anything that a human can access, the wallet can access on many different networks. There are other networks that we're not fully tooled up on in terms of running them through the security gauntlet and doing the analysis. So there are lots of reasons why we need to provide the human freedom to just say, yeah, go ahead, ignore the warning.

So I'm an optimist and I believe that humans will remain front and center of the evolution of humanity and intelligence on planet earth. So not really worried about that. I don't think that there may be autonomous branches of machine intelligence that go off and form their own society. I don't know that they need to be that physical or I don't know that they need to inhabit an ecological niche that would be conflicting with humans. There are lots of species on the planet and we all sort of adjust ourselves so that we settle into our economic niches basically. I don't see a lot of drive currently in the machine intelligence space to do stuff. So it's pretty much humans that are dictating the needs and the directions of the use of the technology, essentially tool-like mechanisms right now. They could certainly evolve to having agency and their own society. But I expect that if we take the approach of treating machine intelligence as essentially children or offspring, intelligences that need to be guided to learn values, then I think we can evolve beautifully together. And I really do think that we're going to need machine intelligence because the world is at a very complicated point in terms of the global economy and geopolitics. And the way out of this is to move from a mindset of scarcity, where we're all killing each other or stealing each other's stuff in order to survive. We have been doing that for maybe millions of years. And the way to get out of that is to build an economy, a society based on abundance, so that we're not constantly fearful. So I think creating a highly efficient hybrid human machine intelligence economy will enable us to do that, and then we'll have less need, less inclination to be adversarial. And so we can start focusing on creativity and education and healing the many aspects of the world that need it.

So I would say, revising my Miami statement if I did make that, there are two major vectors coming online right now. One is machine intelligence, the hybrid human machine economy. The other is traditional finance needing to get on chain because it's going to be increasingly legal. And there are things happening geopolitically. There are things happening in our own ecosystem where projects like prediction markets and perpetuals are providing 24/7 access to effectively hedging your positions or hyper liquid commodities or other instruments, where if there is some sort of military action at 2:30 in the morning on a Sunday, you'll be able to hedge yourself or move your assets around. And most financial institutions in the US couldn't, for regulatory reasons, really get on chain properly. But now the ones that are already sophisticated are moving in straight lines to get on chain and the ones who have been hanging back because it wasn't safe to do so from a regulatory perspective are now figuring out how to stand up their own settlement networks in the form of layer twos or private networks, and also have wallet components for institutions that use them or for their retail customers that need 24/7/365 access. In terms of the agentic economy, it's a lot of people trying to figure it out right now. The MetaMask wallet will make it much more comfortable to do experimentation. And with the speed of development of AI, I think by the end of the year we'll see a huge amount of activity on chain. So there's ERC-402 that's going to make micro payments and machine to machine payments easy and inexpensive, and ERC-8004 is enabling agents to register themselves and their capabilities or skills and enables a reputation system to be attached to that sort of activity. So it'll happen fast. And the speed of our rails will enable the economy to accelerate. So we'll be able to pack in far more value creating transactions per unit time when all this is happening via on chain based agreements, just different transactions that can be done machine to machine. So no longer will clearing and settlement be T+2 or T+1. It'll be T+12 seconds and then T+8 seconds and so on.

Sure. It may not happen exactly as it may not rhyme that well with the previous ones, but the era of decentralized protocols, the age of Ethereum is ahead of us. We've been building in a period of gestation and infancy and childhood and early adolescence, and we're just about to take our place. We're just about to go mainstream and become systemically important. So up to now, it's just been the crypto nerds building the protocols and the crypto, DeFi and finance people building DeFi protocols and kicking the tires on those things, and the art nerds wrapping their art in non-fungible token containers and collecting those things and kicking the tires in that world. So we've been doing all these innovations and each one ends up being irrational exuberance and blow off top and then consolidation. But it's a new primitive and it's something that we can have on our design palettes and build on as the technology goes mainstream. So with machine intelligence and traditional finance now being forcing functions on essentially pushing our technology into the mainstream, we still have some beefing up to do in terms of scalability. Our company Consensys is doing a bunch of that work with different financial institutions and financial market infrastructure hubs, and we still have more work to get done in making DeFi and TradFi on DeFi, otherwise known as just finance, to make it really robust, really inexpensive, and ubiquitous. When we have a new significantly decentralized financial layer for the planet, I think we'll see the world of the traditional economy and the web2 world just starting to situate all their offerings on Web3. So Web3 is the decentralized world wide web, the user centric world wide web, where users have agency: economic, social, political, technological agency. And where users are empowered by machine intelligence so that they can access wisdom, best practices, the sum total knowledge that humanity has amassed so far, talk to domain experts to brainstorm on what to build. So I think it's at that point that we'll have maybe most of the world joining us crypto degens, experiencing the excitement of new waves of innovation becoming tokenized and driving commercial activity. So more waves to come, and I expect they'll be way bigger than anything we've seen in the past.

Absolutely. Joe can beam up over.