Joe Lubin Says the Biggest Crypto Bull Market Is Still Coming
📅 Jun 18, 2026Cointelegraph17 MIN16 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin joins the show to discuss the future of AI agents, MetaMask's new agent wallet, institutional ...
What Joseph Lubin said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Joseph Lubin, CEO of Consensys, discussed the growing role of machine intelligence in the crypto economy, emphasizing the need for secure agentic wallets. He introduced the MetaMask agent wallet, a command-line interface that enforces human-defined policies to prevent AI agents from exceeding allowances. Lubin argued that while AI is improving rapidly, it remains untrustworthy, making such tools essential. He predicted that by the end of 2026, there will be a huge amount of on-chain activity driven by agents and traditional finance. He cited ERC-402 for micro payments and ERC-8004 for agent registration and reputation. Lubin expressed optimism about AI, viewing it as a child to be guided, and believes the hybrid human-machine economy will lead to an abundance-based society. He expects a future bull market, larger than previous ones, as Web3 goes mainstream.
Key takeaways
MetaMask agent wallet is a command-line interface that prevents AI agents from violating human-set policies.
By end of 2026, expect a huge amount of on-chain activity from machine intelligences and traditional finance.
ERC-402 will enable easy and inexpensive micro payments and machine-to-machine payments.
ERC-8004 allows agents to register themselves and their capabilities, enabling a reputation system.
Lubin predicts future bull markets will be way bigger than anything seen before as Web3 goes mainstream.
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.
Yeah. It's such an interesting time. We're seeing this emerge and it's still very young, obviously. Yeah. One thing that I think is interesting is this feels almost as if it's preparation for the next phase. And I recently did an episode of our Daily show and we had a conversation about the transaction volume of AI agents, which is reasonably modest at the moment. Yeah. Do you think the limitation is perhaps infrastructure and you expect it to explode at some point?
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, I mean, if you're lucky enough to be an expert or near an expert in any topic, I think you will have probably seen at some point that AI does get a fair amount wrong in the few areas that I think I see it all the time.
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.
I think there's a lot of doom and gloom when it comes to AI and the way in which people are harnessing it. And I try to skew positive because I do think it could, if managed properly, usher in sort of a golden era for human advancement. But there's no denying that there are some elements that are unsettling. Is there anything that worries you about AI right now?
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Lubin, J. (2026, June 18). Joe Lubin Says the Biggest Crypto Bull Market Is Still Coming [Interview transcript]. Cointelegraph. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/992336/
MLA
Joseph Lubin. "Joe Lubin Says the Biggest Crypto Bull Market Is Still Coming." Cointelegraph, 18 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/992336/.
BibTeX
@misc{lubin2026_992336,
author = {Joseph Lubin},
title = {Joe Lubin Says the Biggest Crypto Bull Market Is Still Coming},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Cointelegraph. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/992336/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
