Leaders of Tomorrow

Transcript

all right good morning everyone Welcome to our fireside chat featuring the true Visionary and leader of blockchain space Joe Luben no introduction needed co-founder of ethereum uh and CEO and founder of consensus a leading blockchain technology company dedicated to building the infrastructure for a decentralized Future Good morning Joe good morning hey everyone ni so today we have the privilege of exploring the theme leaders of Tomorrow empowering the leaders in web 3 uh who will bring a wealth of experience and insight into the evolving blockchain industry without further Ado let's Dive

Right In how are you Joe so welcome to Eon 2024 as always happy to have you on our stage you have inspired and empowered many of us leaders today in the last 10 years of ethereum and will continue to for many many more years uh great to have you excited for our chat absolutely so to begin can we get uh some background story on um the early days of ethereum how you started just get this conversation going a little bit sure so uh my background is um mostly as a technologist um so I uh studied electrical engineering in computer

science and did about a decade of of AI uh research Arch um in mostly academic context uh it was shallow learning back then because we didn't have a lot of data and we didn't have a lot of compute but uh we wired computers together and created uh graphical simulations of things and and we built essentially Economist road vehicles and some other things um and did lots of software engineering over the years um I worked at Golden socks for a little while uh and was sort of at the intersection of Finance um and and various different kinds of technology so U it's impossible

for me to miss Bitcoin and so I jumped in early in 2011 um and and was lucky enough to meet balic uh January 1st 2014 about a month after he wrote the white paper describing ethereum and ethereum had a huge Buzz at that point there were a bunch of projects that were trying to take this new invention of Satoshi decentralized trust and apply it to everything rather than just a narrow use case of money um so there's some cool projects out there uh but ethereum but the balic formulation was just much cleaner much more powerful than any of the other systems and so um it started

with uh with him Gathering a small group of people uh doing meetups uh doing lots of conversations on Skype um if you remember that technology uh and uh uh and by the the end of January uh in 2014 um we gathered uh at the North American Bitcoin conference in Miami uh where metallic was presenting the white paper um and we spent about a week maybe a little more than that in a house together um s of reformatting leadership and reform in the project or formatting the project um and um essentially we're

going to do the token launch on the Tuesday after uh vitalic had given his pretty epic presentation to a standing room only audience um uh in a very big room so there was a huge Buzz around the project uh but then we realized that hey um we probably don't want to be selling something that could be perceived to be on an unregistered security to Americans so maybe we should talk to some ERS so we ended up doing a lot of work to uh uh to give ourselves confidence that we weren't selling a security um and about eight months later we ended up uh doing the token sale um probably the most important thing that I can say about

those early years was that it was a very diverse self- selected group um if we we hadn't talked to some DCS if we decided to take the project to a VC uh DC funded DC controlled DC exploited uh ethereum wouldn't be ethereum right now it would just be an also Ram project so uh the open permissionless nature of just joining the project the very diverse group of people um from very different philosophical and other backgrounds um made it um distinct uh from almost everything else uh and so I I think uh those early days of diversity and

permissionless um essentially led to the success of the project yeah for sure uh So based on how you guys started the the dynamic of what leadership meant 10 years ago versus what that is today um how do you envision the future of leadership is um currently or in the future for a decentralized world and and what are the qualities that will Define uh the leaders of tomorrow um so I think of everything from the lens of decentralization I do believe that we're um in the early days of a paradigm shift uh to a profoundly decentralized world where the world will

re architect all of its systems on decentralized Rails um and so there's uh we're certainly going to be moving away from large monolithic organizations with massive hierarchy uh that operate by command and control um those kinds of systems are already losing trust uh they're already breaking down um there's a a Nobel uh economics Prize winner guy named Ronald Coos um he um wrote a some work on the theory of the firm his work was all about uh why it's more efficient or better uh to have a whole bunch of functionalities inside

a firm rather than accessible in an open market and it was all about to uh reducing your coordination costs essentially inside the firm so with our technology um we can imagine a future where um instead of large companies large monolithic companies we can imagine projects or companies that are smaller Loosely coupled functional units uh that coordinate and operate via protocols and Via onchain governance um at consensus uh as you said working to inspire and empower the Builder in everyone and we believe decentralized technology will enable everyone to have

essentially greater economic agency in their lives and far more direct political agency so leadership in that sort of context will still be important um as decentralized Society es um and the decentralized economy builds itself um there will just be far more leaders of far more projects um or companies and the average size of those companies will be far smaller than the average day but so many of those projects will be fluidly connected to one another uh via protocols via decentralized collaboration and governance um that'll probably be more efficient um to have

those um self-contained functional units and having them work together inside a traditional company so leaders uh will be all over the place and they'll uh need diverse skills based on their context great um so aside from that I feel like like uh comparing to other Industries um a person with the correct skill sets and the right moral fiber can succeed in any industry um for ethereum what are things can we can do as industry uh in Your

Vision um to in establishing a new trust Foundation uh what can we do to attract uh those leaders to come into this industry um so ethereum um has distinguished itself as um what I think it as the largest decentralized protocol ecosystem I call it Metropolitan ethereum because it's ethereum proper the main protocol uh but the protocol is expanding to to there too and trees and higher and there's work going on right now uh that's going to expand it even more um some leaders like Justin Drake and others talk about those Dimensions um I think uh ethereum in my opinion um

is um the tightest warmest Community um so warm that uh we welcome all the decentralized protocol projects uh to our events um and we see the decentralized future as encompassing just a tremendous variety of decentralized protocols that uh um and we'll all be connected up with one another um and you know it's about uh intellectual honesty um so if we can stick to um telling the truth about what we're doing not embellishing what we're doing and will continue to be able to attract the best and the brightest um researchers and

technologists so we've been very fortunate so far and uh um I expect that will continue great great so regarding the next 10 years of ethereum uh what are some of the most exciting advancements in the ecosystem that you believe will shape the future of this technology and the ecosystem um there are just so many um so we've uh uh we or Satoshi really invented this this new kind of trust decentralized trust uh and we've taken that and we've built um uh Foundation of a new kind of system uh that's very different from the

old system the old system was based on top down command and control where you got authorities in VI um Authority and Trust in intermediaries the intermediaries maintain ledgers or databases of who owns what and who has what um rights or responsibilities um and that worked really well to build an impressive Society but it pretty much didn't work well for 99% of the people in in the society um throughout history um Satoshi invented this next Generation kind the database um that is inspectable by everyone accessible permissionless by anyone to deploy applications or use applications um and upon that new trust

Foundation we built decentralized Finance which is a um profoundly um more impactful uh and serves the end user better uh than traditional Finance uh and we're just starting to cross the chasm uh so def cross the chasm into mainstream culture a little bit nfts have done it a little bit um with layer 2os layer 3es um like abss V and layer and other projects um we now have uh the kind of scalability uh transaction b space affordability usability especially as intense Spas architectures mature uh

so that we we can um build real applications for end user consumers and end user Enterprises so it's about to be on um and um we uh moving now I think from the the heavily speculative phase of the decentralized protocol ecosystem uh into a phase in which a lot of real applications are going to be genuinely useful to to people and organizations what about what about AI that's been taking a lot of attention away from the blockchain industry uh it's pretty relevant as said gained a lot of adoption this past year how do you see the integration of blockchain and AI

influencing the development of any new Industries and the evolution of existing ones yeah so uh integration of these two most important Technologies is so important um I I've written a piece that isn't published yet I think it titles something like uh um the the necessary integration of AI and and decentralized protocols so so decentralized protocols alone uh would have a massive impact on all the systems of the world financial economic social political technological if AI didn't

exist the world would transform and decentralized protocols alone would accelerate everything over the next few decades and make the lives of so many people better um but it doesn't exist alone AI would have a similarly massive impact if it was alone and decentralized protocols didn't exist um but centralized AI in the hands of big Tech uh could lead them to build the most powerful and dangerous tool for controlling Humanity ever built and big Tech already does um deeply concerning things um and and great things too um uh but imagine big Tech uh social networks uh of today knowing everything

about you and everything about every everything else and uh and continuing to have the profit motive uh or a power motive as primary so um the bigger AI projects of the future must be built as largely open source uh transparently built and with decentralized governance and hopefully with decentralized mechanisms for sourcing data for compute for storage um there are a wide variety of things that that could be used you can imagine ZK all over the place in those systems can gr models that you can offer under zero knowledge um so you can have data that can be offered under zero

knowledge essentially every country organization Community uh every person uh in the decentralized protocol AI future must be in full control the AI agents that that they'll depend on because we're really going to merge with them in a significant way in the same way that uh we're already cybernetic creatures um with our laptops and our phones um it's uh obviously going to be um much more um integrated between our AI allies um and uh and US humans yeah as as BL an AI Tech become more pervasive in our daily lives uh

what are some of the key ethical considerations uh we should address um so I guess be good to people that's an obvious one so if you're a person be good to other people uh if you're uh a non-human intelligence be good to other people and nonhuman intelligences um so I don't really want to say too much about ethics other than um we need to Define all the possible dimensions of decentralization it comes down to decentralization and the ways we can measure these Dimensions the the ways we can uh do our best to keep progressing

our most important systems like the big foundational models and and big um crypto protocols um towards more and more rigorous decentralization uh if we get decentralization right um then communities should be free to develop U their own ethical systems uh that serve those communities well there's so many diverse cultures on the planet and uh uh we might come up with uh shared ethical systems uh but also um a community could have a set of Ethics that serve them really well that uh it would be horrifying to me and who might who apprach my own efforts on that

yeah okay now we kind of laid out what it could look like in the next couple years um coming back what are some of the challenges you see as we get into it and maybe based from your previous experience how you have handled it uh just to gauge that a little bit um so technologically it's gone remarkably well um so mostly uh I I think it's going to be a a very multi-protocol World um lots of modular protocols and operating smoothly with one another will have uh coherent um relatively uniform user interfaces in

the same way that uh that we don't know if we're interacting with a graph database or a SQL database or nosql database or some sort of flat file uh when we're using a two application um we're probably not going to know how applications in web 3 areed across different decentralized protocol database Technologies and and it's great that uh they will all have different characteristics um for for you know watching with different characteristics storage Etc um so you build out uh for scalability usability affordability um abs are going to enable us to um make it

much easier for startups to build you know raise some Capital build a product find product Market bit um and then not uh have to give away a giant amount of tokens um in order to attract a community um temporarily um and so uh you can have people uh businesses validating your protocol or um your Prov systems or your solver systems and um that sort of effort to create the community um can be much easier with the the prate and uh and adss um so it's essentially hard to

shift um one of the most fundamental paradigms on which society's based centralized trust and top down command and control so so the sociological political um friction are incredibly difficult uh government laws are difficult to to shift um so I think the best way uh for us to help the world understand um our technology and the paradigm shift that it's suggesting is to build sufficiently scalable affordable usable infrastructure uh which we've done we're there and we're going to have to keep building scalability afford US pretty good on affordability but uh much better usability is still needed um and we're there uh so that now creative people uh

from the traditional economy from web 2 uh can start building compelling applications for consumers and businesses and communities so uh we're about to cross the CM I think in into mainstream culture in a lot of different isses uh great okay um going on a different direction now we're seeing the first or we just saw the ethereum ETF um in in your opinion what is the potential impact of defi on a Global Financial system and what barriers must be overcomed to achieve that impact um so the the Bitcoin ETFs the

ethereum ETFs um are going to have such a powerful effect on our ecosystem so and it's more than just them um it's uh it's the judicial system in the US in the United States um it has been helping our industry uh because uh the government the executive branch has been trying to kill or co-opt our industry um the legislative branch um has been doing what it does best which is do nothing um and unfortunately the courts have been uh really quite helpful uh so they're pretty neutral and clear thinking and uh

they've helped our ecosystem um the um presidential uh elections and other elections uh in November uh have been heating up and uh crypto is a very important technology and those people are starting to understand that crypto is a very powerful Lobby right now a very powerful group of people and so um uh a few different uh court cases um had impact um on on even the mainstream media um and that got the notice of Donald Trump who

opportunistically uh and probably aligned with the with his philosophy um has jumped in and indicated uh especially in the speech earlier today uh that he wants to uh prioritize crypto um as uh as an important foundational technology for for the US to to get behind and uh and he promised for what it's worth to uh to get rid of the um the frictions that the government and and probably probably big banks have been working hard to to put more of those um uh the Democratic party kamla Harris um is also working with uh with

knowledgeable people in our ecosystem so we expect both sides to come out with uh some very positive statements and support for our ecosystem um um it's looking like it's on um and you know defi defi itself is still really raw and immature uh but it has the potential to be orders of magnitude better than Trad F so in a few years uh I'm pretty confident it'll all just be called Finance as the laws shift as stable coins um grow really large um and as tokenized real world asset um systems grow um those are simpler foundational

elements and uh and essentially when you when you put some of those fundamental things um on our rails uh and traditional businesses start to get comfortable with them uh then essentially all businesses will will start to run on decentralized protocol rails very similar to um the internet transformation of society where um first there were internet companies and then every company was on the inter amazing uh I think we have time for one last question um I think like this this conversation can carry for hours but as as for the people who are here today um

on the topic of lead ership what advice would you give to aspiring leaders and innovators who are passionate about decentralization in blockchain Tech and want to make a meaningful impact in this world um so young people are so lucky um right now um because they were born into a very tough very confusing period um but the period uh that we're in right now is the end of uh what I think of and many people think of as an 80 to 100e super cycle super cycle can be defined uh the

uh cycling of different kinds of generations or it's a monetary and debt super cycle but with respect to finance economics monetary systems geopolitics the world is cracking up um so um fortunately as this super cycle uh races into brick wall uh a new super cycle um has been um establishing itself for the last few years um the new new super cycle is based on decentralization um and uh and it's clearly going to be super judged by AI uh the amount and pace of growth that the younger generation will experience uh at the

start of this next Super Cycle will be orders of magnitude bigger and faster than anything we can imagine um and it will keep accelerating um it's so great time to to be a builder uh pick things you care about uh don't take jobs that feel like drudgery uh there can be so many opportunities uh so um work on something you're passionate about dive in deep um it may not work if it doesn't work you'll learn something and you'll take it to your next project the cycle liation is going to be so fast that um you can imagine being part of a project that rises so strongly and then subsides because some somebody fors it and does a

little bit better but get used to get used to succeeding really profoundly for a little while because um long-term durable success is going to be less common there will be some foundational protocols that will stick around for a long time but uh the face of innovation is going to be so fast so pick what you care about um become expert and growth will be everywhere and um you're probably not going to have one success going forward you'll probably have lots great great um personal question if you had to pick one quality for to define a leader in this space uh specifically in web 3 in ethereum what would that quality be to be a leader

today in 2024 can I pick more than one I'm gonna pick more than one uh so Integrity tell the truth uh sensitivity take care of the people around you um and dedication for sure you guys heard it uh thank you Joe thank you for being part of our 2024 icon uh looking forward to the next one yeah thanks for having me have a nice day bye have a good day Joe Luben everyone [Applause]