Joe Lubin: Why the Biggest Banks Are Now Building on Ethereum

Transcript

Welcome back to the Rollup. I'm Robbie. I'm Andy. >> Robbie and I met at the University of Florida in 2017, [music] where we first found out about digital assets. >> We learned a lot along the way, and we're bringing you face-to-face with the leaders of our industry. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode. Hey, Robbie. Hey, hey. GM. GM. Good to see you. We still say GM? Um uh a long time ago, um uh I and some people were were trying to extend the innovation of GM and turn it into cuz we were going GM, GA, GN, etc. And so I I started doing GX, where X is a variable that can stand for anything.

And so we're trying to get it to to catch on globally, and we're still working on it. So GX. >> GX. Uh the X can be anything you want. Um well, I think uh that's a good context because you know, we have been engaging and entering uh the institutional era of Ethereum, uh some are calling it, which has been 500 years in the making based on what we were talking about backstage. Um and uh one of the things that I 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 I have to speak their language. Um you've been in the space, you've talked to uh 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 when we address, you know, these larger capital allocators and businesses, and you know, as we introduce them to Ethereum and DeFi? How much do we introduce them to the culture versus just, you know, taking taking the vibes out of the the technology?

Uh so I I think it's always valuable and important to understand who you're speaking to, um, what their mental models might be of the world and to do your best to communicate in terms that, uh, uh, that are more effective for them to understand what you're trying to communicate um uh, that said, uh, when we talk to different kinds of financial institutions and we're we're doing that quite a lot, um, they're really smart, they're really savvy. Uh, they've a lot of them have been um, doing the work for the last 10 plus years to understand our technology and our ecosystem. Um, I wouldn't walk into, uh, a meeting and say GM or GX, uh, but,

uh, uh, in terms of talking about the um, the intricate details of our technology, um, we can go there. Uh, and that there are good reasons why uh, they're paying a huge amount of attention to to what we're doing. Absolutely, and this has been a long time in the making. Um, you mentioned backstage 500 years this has been in the making. I'm I'm curious why now? Um, 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. Um, what happened over the last 500 years

that has gotten to a point where the largest financial institutions in the world are are now deploying on chain? Um so I I like to think of what we've been doing in our ecosystem as both, uh, revolutionary, um, and evolutionary. Um, so we, uh, essentially, uh, with Bitcoin, uh, and Ethereum and the growing metropolitan Ethereum ecosystem [clears throat] and other protocols that are trying to do similar things. Um we've been speed running uh the last 500 years of innovation uh in traditional finance and uh um so some of those things include

just how do we um form pools of capital, peer pools of capital, so that we can share risk and and do much bigger things. Uh so joint stock corporations um and bonds, uh nation states issuing bonds to do really big infrastructural things and uh so that category is like uh how do you do big things, how do you coordinate things, and how do you ensure that the claims that people have um are respected, are trusted, um and how do you make them more efficient to to trade and and things like that. And there are other innovations uh like so many um wiring [snorts]

um wiring funds, Western Union pioneered that and uh um trade finance mechanisms, bills of lading, and uh go all the way to uh uh innovations in options and ATMs and and stuff like that. And uh um so these these fall into categories. Um scaling trust is a category that's really important. Uh so far we've only been able to to scale centralized trust in the world. Um pricing risk, uh sharing risk, um settlement, uh fast settlement, fast dissemination of information, um and all those things um are things that we've been like

uh doing an incredible job on in our ecosystem. Uh so why now? Um A um we're at the end of a supercycle and there's been a loss of trust in centralized institutions. Uh the world has been as or society has been built on institutional trust, and institutional trust has been lost in the last few decades. So, so we're at the end of this super cycle, the world is cracking up in different ways, and uh uh and along comes Satoshi Nakamoto and invents this most profound new form of trust, decentralized trust, and uh and a lot of people say, "Wow, um uh we're engineers,

we can take this new form of decentralized trust, which uh Satoshi showed us how to operationalize in Bitcoin, and we can apply it to all the systems of the world." And so, uh we built this new foundational trust um platform, um Ethereum makes it available to all sorts of software engineers. Uh we've been building DeFi um to build uh really efficient, effective financial rails for the decentralized emerging global economy, and now um now we've scaled it, uh we've made it affordable, usable. Um the United States of America was trying to make it illegal for a while um under the the previous administration, but now

it's getting more and more legal. Um and now organizations, enterprises, financial institutions can um tokenize um instruments. Um the stablecoin phenomenon is going big, tokenized deposits. Um companies can make use of DeFi, and and so the uh the technology is now scalable and usable enough, um and uh and we're getting essentially um gale-force winds in our sails from uh from regulators and legislators uh in the United States, and uh um and that's going to be great. It's going to be great for people. Uh this

ecosystem, this technology is all about uh empowering people and communities. It's all about making sure that people and organizations have economic, social, political, financial agency in their lives. And so we need decentralized trust, we need decentralized rails. Decentralization enables censorship resistance, enables credible neutrality of platforms so that you can't get deplatformed. And I guess the final piece is self-custody of your assets. And so if we can land all that and if we can do it in our own ecosystem, which has gone

really well for for 10 plus years, and if we can now do it from inside the existing bigger financial ecosystem because they really do appreciate our technology, then I think we will have achieved what many of us early in the Ethereum ecosystem wanted to achieve, which was to enable decentralized trust to to permeate the whole world. Which is incredibly relevant and important given that we are at the end of a trust supercycle as you mentioned. And and so now looking ahead one chapter closes the next one opens the beginning of a new supercycle is this one with decentralized trust.

Um and as we're looking at onboarding lots of these institutions, there's people that have been around in the community in in Ethereum for a long time. I think some people are very excited, but there's a subset of the people that you know are maybe disillusioned by prices could be fueling, you know, some of the negativity, but also maybe something that we could call institutional derangement syndrome. Like they're not happy that you know the the institutions managing billions and trillions are looking at blockchain.

They say get your permissioned assets, you know, with your qualified custodians out of my self-custody infinite garden. Um, you know, these institutions, they love programmability. They love transparent risk modeling. They can be a lot more efficient. They can be composable, but they don't have to trust one another. All of that is great, but they can do all of that without decentralization. I'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 pragmatism.

Um, so I guess you have to look at at who's actually disappointed or or disillusioned with how things are going in our ecosystem. I've never been more bullish. And we we continue to grow our ecosystem. If you blur your eyes, it's basically this this pretty rapid exponential. And it's very volatile. It's volatile because excuse me, the the global economy is cracking up and it's really volatile and we're the tail on the global economy dog. And so we're we're going to be even more volatile.

And as our technology matures and as our technology as our tokens get more and more valuable, it's going to be harder to to move them around. Um, but um, as with any financial ecosystem, I think things were really crazy with the D gens in the 1500s and the 1600s where they were they were trading um, trading shares of things in in I don't know, different houses of of imbibing alcohol and smoking pipes or whatever they did back then.

And all these innovations came along and and brought more trust and more structure and more standardization to those situations. And so, um, we sped run all of that stuff. And so, uh, we were building our technology ecosystem um on live monetary rails. And that's never been done before. Uh, and so, uh, globally accessible, uh, wicked information asymmetries. And so, um, there are a lot of good actors who are just, you know, trying to to do, quote, the right things and build, uh, um, useful infrastructure for people and and organizations and communities. Uh, but they're always, um, uh, people and groups that that come in

and see an innovation and try to, um, copy it and do a bad job on it or or or, um, do some sort of, uh, corrupt-looking thing. Uh, so, um, the the, um, the core people in our industry, uh, think of decentralization as a design principle. Um, others in our industry have thought about decentralization as a marketing term. Uh, and and have not, uh, uh, been rigorous about, uh, how how to build out the ecosystem. So, um, uh, we're essentially a a startup economy, um, and um, startup economies take a while

to much much longer than a a startup company, um, to find product market fit or um I don't know, economy market fit or or something like that. I don't know I don't know how to express that. Um, but, uh, things have gone incredibly well, um, and um, we have found, uh, essentially economy market fit at this point. And part of that, uh, um, will um, um, will really go mainstream is going mainstream, as uh as we um build it into more and more systems in the world. Yeah. And decentralization as a design principle is still very early.

It's still very bullish. Decentralization as a virtue-signaling marketing term, not not so much. Um, but pragmatic decentralization is still certainly here and important. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinitify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinitify is a battle-tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinitify.xyz. Go anywhere on chain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on $10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Um, and so now looking ahead um with the institutional adoption of you know, some some of the greatest capital allocators with the most resources at their disposal, right?

They're tokenizing every asset. This is bringing um a much, much, you know, more expressive, robust uh economy of tokens that are all coming on chain. All of these becoming composable with one another. Now we have regulation to support and bolster um what a thriving ecosystem on chain looks like when you have a lot of these assets all mixed in on the same chains. Um, looking ahead to the future, how do we navigate what this structure, this market structure could look like when we have we have uh you know, regulated financial products right next to Beyoncé tickets. Like how does how do we structure these things so that we don't mix anything that

shouldn't be mixed, but we still have an open composable world that we can transact on? Yeah so I I agree with you that there is some uh virtue signaling uh in some some projects, but uh um a A interpretation of that is that um uh there are different degrees of decentralization that are necessary and effective uh at different layers of of the economy or or of systems. Uh and so um at the base layer, we need uh rigorous decentralization. We need to define all the dimensions of decentralization, whether it's power grid, uh legal systems, um

data centers, protocols, number of clients, etc. Um And you know, um the reason why uh I and many people um believe that uh Ethereum layer one and the metropolitan Ethereum ecosystem um is has already won uh and is uh is going to uh grow dramatically uh is because um you know, Bitcoin was built at a special point in time. You can't do that again. Ethereum was also built at a special moment in time in which uh we had um uh the best talent, um the focus on rigorous decentralization, and we could spend essentially 10 years um building

layers and layers of of enabling technology and scalability, um while focusing on doing the hard thing, which is uh maintaining rigorous decentralization. And there are all these pockets of centralization that pop up and and we need to address those and build protocols uh uh to reduce the centralization. Um but uh um as the world builds on this rigorously decentralized layer, um there's nothing wrong with having um sufficiently decentralized consortium systems, sufficiently decentralized DeFi niches, um I agree that with Vitalik that uh um we should have some layer twos that uh

um accomplish stage one, stage two. We should also have some layer twos that uh that build a lot of different kinds of database constructs. You know, the web two has equal knows equal vector graph object. So many different kinds of databases for for different purposes. And in the web three economy, we're going to need most of these databases to speak token because companies assets will be tokenized and they'll need to connect to layer twos and and layer ones etc. To be part of the economy. So I think we're moving into a world where they'll be hundreds of thousands or millions of corpo blockchains where where you put

your smart contract applications and you invite your partners and your users on onto your chain and so virtue signaling may be a first stage in in moving to sufficient decentralization. Havachi is fast and [music] private purpose trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to havachi.xyz [music] to start trading today. Um, let's have quickly two two more questions. First is given this trust super cycle coming to a close in this next super cycle opening, how do how should we prepare ourselves for this next super cycle? Maybe you can just illustrate what this next super cycle is as a result of this trust super cycle

coming to a close and how we should prepare for it. Yeah, so I can do it through what we're building in the form of metamask. Metamask was a tool for asserting your digital authority in web three for enabling you to maintain self custody and control of your assets. Metamask evolved into being a wallet and portfolio management and Metamask is now it's becoming a personal money operating system. It's a new kind of neo bank that you fully own and control. The next super cycle is going to be all about decentralized rails. It's going to be Web 3 is going to be user-centric rather than Web 2 being corporation-centric

where you're the product and and you're exploited and etc. etc. Um and um under Web 3 we're going to be enormously empowered um by AI. So, we're going to be able to level ourselves up in real time. We're going to have our own digital twins that we're bonded with that uh that help us understand things rapidly and help engage uh you know, help set up swarms of of open claw uh personas with different kinds of skills etc. We'll see. That's moving really fast. Uh and so um it it is about uh essentially um taking control of our lives and and operating through this infrastructure and and through

essentially your own financial system um and your own um I guess uh persona cognition system that uh I I'm already a a hybrid human-machine intelligence with my phone and my laptop etc. and uh uh so I I look forward to expanding uh um my hybridization and I'm I look forward to us all all the humans and all the machine intelligences essentially hybridizing into um a a global organism that uh um is pretty aligned uh as much as we can with uh with what's going on around us.

It it's happening. Um the the last question which I didn't originally have on on my on my list here, but we saw Hester Peirce uh SEC Commissioner backstage and she wanted me to ask you what the SEC is doing wrong. And so obviously they've done a lot of great work. They've done you know, the SEC and the CFTC has been very active much more so than the last administration. A lot of good work, but um she's very she's curious. What are what is the SEC doing wrong? Um I I take that question as as a statement of the openness and the constructiveness of this new SEC.

Uh I love this new SEC. Uh Paul Atkins, Hester, etc. are doing such important things uh for the United States and and for the world. Um I guess we could ask what legislators are doing wrong. Uh potentially uh some of them are are blowing those gale-force winds in our sails and and uh some of them um are a little more resistant. And so we're we're still dealing with uh uh with uh um progressive elements of the Democratic Party that uh believe really big government and and rigorous granular control over all aspects of human life uh is the right way to go. Uh I disagree

with that. Uh I think uh we can build a a decentralized uh AI um saturated uh global economy uh that uh that self-polices itself. Um and you know, there's there's still big banks that uh are sort of trying to retain some of the unfair advantages that they currently have uh in in the current system. Um that's all it's all moving pretty well right now and so um the big banks should be trying to protect their advantages, but they're also ready to take advantage of the opportunities in in our ecosystem. So I think it's going to move fast and well.

Awesome. Thank you, Joe Lubin, for uh your time and your contributions to Ethereum. Appreciate it.