SotN #33: Joseph Lubin on CME ETH Futures (Future of ETH, 2021 Bull Run, Consensys)

Transcript

now all right bankless nation welcome to another episode of state of the nation we've got a special guest here joe lubin before we get to joe state of the nations what do we do during state of the nations david we talk about a headline article a headline news piece something in the news cycle that that is uh one moment i got the audio going into my ears we talk about something that's going through the new cycle which for this week it was the cme futures launch something cool that happens every single week we get a guest on to talk about what's going on in the news cycle and of course this week it's it's joseph lubin who has watched the growth of ethereum since day one and now that eth futures our launch we want to

get joe on to talk about really what does this mean for the story of ether the asset and ethereum the economy it has been quite the journey so getting joe's thoughts here are going to be cool um state of the nation comes out every tuesday we stream this live over youtube so catch it there that's the best way to catch it you can also get it directly into your ears via the podcast so catch it that way too we released the podca cast episodes on wednesday david before we get to cme futures before we talk to joe a few things going on in the nation that we should talk about we just had vitalik on the podcast where we got his reflections on the year that was 2020.

we talked about rollups we also talked about smart contract wallets in particular the ux around social recovery that was an awesome episode what were your takeaways there yeah i often say that the crypto industry has one of the best vantage points to see the rest of the world because there's so many different things that happen that are happening in the world that are very new in 2020 and now 2021 money printer go burr the president getting d platformed uh you know social unrest and crypto offers like a lens to see all of it and that's kind of what vitalik put into his 2020 reflections uh blog post which i thought found absolutely fascinating vitalik does a good job kind of putting into perspective how he sees the world and

how crypto is going to impact the world uh when we when just the uh collision course of crypto impacts the rest of the world which we all think is coming especially this year um and so that was a pretty uh interesting piece and then of course we get into more ethereum-centric conversations such as roll-ups and how roll-ups work and why roll-ups are so cool and also the intersection of social recovery and uh smart contract wallets specifically on l2's like roll-ups vitalik is long-term bullish on smart contract wallets on l2 platforms and so that was just a fantastic pieces of blog post vitalik's blog post that we went through so really informative episode

absolutely anytime vitalik is on a podcast i make a point to listen because there's always something insightful there so do that that came out on monday we also have brett johnson who is coming out next week our podcast recording with him this is the guy behind the dollar milkshake theory and we asked brett about the crypto milkshake theory but we also talk about the dollar's reserve currency status so if you are tracking this from a monetary theory perspective make sure you tune into that episode coming next monday and then david this thursday we have a live ama with tasha from the alpha finance protocol this protocol has been like exploding in growth just a massive amount of lock the last time i looked it was like three and a half perce uh no it was it

was half a percent of beef lock 350 million or something eth locked inside of the alpha finance protocol so this is going to be a community ama with tasha where we figure out uh where they're going next yeah this is the amas are fantastic for me personally because i ask my own questions that i'm interested in i i get a ton of learning done during these things and then of course we always turn to the youtube chat box to get listener questions as well the last ama we did the chat box was a pretty fun place to be and so if you have questions about what alpha is how it works or what's going on with alpha in the future definitely tune in to that ama coming this thursday guys this is the secret david and i do this bankless thing for ourselves so

that we can level up and so that we can learn and we're just open sourcing it that's actually that's actually the entire platform open source learning yeah all right david before we get to joe uh i'm gonna ask you the question i always ask you at the beginning of state of the nations what is the state of the nation this week my friend the state of the nation is astounded we are astounded elon musk the world's richest man the the ceo of like the most beloved uh company at least from a younger person's perspective just bought 1.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin like we've never seen a that large of a single purchase of bitcoin ever and it's been done by like elon musk who has a just a massive platform and a massive following

on twitter so like just adding a core core fundamental character right into the heart of like the bitcoin world and like bitcoin paints its largest candle ever a one day candle eight thousand dollars in a single day absolutely insane uh i'm astounded i'm pretty sure the rest of the banquets nation is astounded as well yeah it's it's it's a pretty big week and i i kind of woke up to the fact that oh uh crypto's mainstream now like that's what's happening uh you're still maybe early on eat you're still maybe early on d5 you are no longer early on bitcoin right like elon musk is buying it and it's going mainstream this is also going to get some of the i think the wall street bets crowd involved of course tesla is one of their beloved stocks and i think given

the events of gamestop we've talked about that a lot here this is going to draw some of their attention too so dude overall bullish it's it's astounding good word choice my friend i'm wondering when you're going to run out of adjectives though we're going through them quick that's awesome especially the bullish ones all right guys last thing um consensus the conference is coming up this is a really exciting conference to attend especially in a crypto bull market i remember my first uh bull market consensus conference it was absolutely off the wall insane they're doing it virtual this year it's happening may 24th ray dalio is coming like we couldn't get ray dalio you know five years ago so this is consensus the conference of course you can reserve

your place now you could save 20 with bankless we've got a link in the show notes for you so do that in just a moment we will be back to talk to joe lubin co-founder of ethereum about eth futures but before we do uh we want to tell you about our fantastic sponsors who made this episode possible ave is a borrowing and lending protocol on ethereum and just recently released ave version 2 which has a ton of cool new features that makes using ave even more powerful with ave you can leverage the full power of d5 money legos yield and composability all in one application on ave there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield

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he's also the founder of consensus which has built some of the most important pieces of ethereum infrastructure over the years including metamask which if you're going bank list you probably use just about every day also get coin if you're a truffle many other pieces of infrastructure joe how are you doing today sir welcome to bankless um great thank you i've been sitting back here in the weight room i've got a an appointment scheduled with my bank list managers what about treasury management for the people who like ether you know there's a live shot of david somewhere on twitter and he he was caught in a inside of wells fargo today i'm not sure how that happened david but like you're supposed to be bankless man you're inside of wells fargo what's going on yeah

somebody caught me making a deposit [Laughter] well very good uh well joe this is a really exciting week i think for all of crypto david just talked about elon musk and his purchase bitcoin earlier but also um the launch of ether futures on the cme maybe we could kind of rewind the clock a little bit and talk about because you've seen this project uh through from inception basically um like two weeks ago okay well yeah two weeks weeks not months right so but uh joe you you when you were starting the project early on with the other kind of co-founders um how did you think about

ethiosa did you ever think that there would be a day where it would be traded on the chicago cme um so i um locked in pretty early on this stuff i thought that when i read pretty much right when i read the bitcoin white paper i thought it would be uh massively transformational uh i thought it would take quite a long time um i have been called uh an optimist or a true believer and so i i um i did um think that uh um that there would be profound transformation accelerated by vitalik's

vision um over how fast it would have happened if we were uh sort of moving bits around with a scanning tunneling microscope and trying to build software that way on on the bitcoin protocol um and i did i've i've spoken over the years about the fact that we were building uh infrastructure and that that infrastructure was what a commodity like or would take on similar architectures as that of grains and precious metals and other kinds of commodities and so would need um financial instruments and deep financial infrastructure to get

more efficient we've seen so we started out with super inefficient mining and and wallets that would just set prices for you and nobody would even know what they were or or adjust them ever and uh and recently uh our infira team um is launching something uh really really cool called the infura transactions manager and they've demonstrated that uh people are overpaying pretty massively um just because there's so much fear about getting your transaction handled uh that we can actually um [Music] using various techniques and intelligence we can

actually just assure people that the the pitfalls uh um that are inherent in sometimes in in trying to get transactions processed uh are managed by a service that uh can save you money and um and uh guarantee nearly uh that uh what you want to happen does happen uh so uh i would say that uh yes uh i did and and several people did anticipate that things would go mainstream it is astonishing to see how fast it's happened um and i kind of want to call out my friends at paris so we've been involved uh

as investors and and really actively with that project early on uh airsects uh um so so the cme news is incredible um super excited about it um it is much more institutional focused um retail trader would um have to jump through some hoops to take advantage of that uh airsecs actually paved the way uh for um for the cme futures so they launched may of last year i think um so they've got bitcoin futures ether futures and spot and um and they're certainly more friendly uh to retail and they're um

[Music] they have a physically delivered product which i think is important it's something that i've been talking about for a long time if you're a speculator or need to hedge in other ways on making sure the difference from basis is not because these are really two different markets two different liquidity pools and they can get skewed pretty badly uh and so making sure that they're locking in at uh uh at delivery yeah yeah uh you know physical delivery is is is key i'm i'm wondering your your thoughts on this is this the kind of the the cme the listing on the cme and airs x as as you

were mentioning earlier kind of paved the way for this but is this basically u.s regulators signaling that yes we agree eth is a commodity asset eth is a commodity money yes absolutely so he harvard made that statement explicitly the secs basically said that we said that um in the first few months of the ethereum project that we saw it as as a fuel as one of the first uh crypto commodities um there are others and will be other crypto commodities um and

he said money in there uh i don't know if you think about whether he does money or not but uh i thought about that dave and i have given that some thought and we've come to the conclusion that indeed it is money indeed is money do you concur david it is known so so the question is what is money or what is money going forward um we know the three definitions of money um so numerous um means of exchange uh store of value um and we've positioned ether as a crypto fuel um we also positioned it as a better money than money and a better money than bitcoin even because it's

programmable and cheaper to fire around sometimes usually we'll see that that will uh change in both directions over time um and money is kind of contextual and social and symbolic so cigarettes are money in some cases um notches on sticks are money in some cases i would argue in the future that we're not going to need abstract money so much except as a numerator i would argue that maybe that gets taken care of by evolving baskets of tokens um but uh their money is really a convenience right now and in a world in which we're tokenizing everything and in

which we have um intelligent agents um determining which tokens you want to get rid of when you're paying for something first and which tokens you want to receive when you're receiving um in a certain order um and exchange services that can help you make that trade if you're not able to accomplish that directly and just listings of tokens um where you've got these open markets uh that are valuing the tokens whether they're automated market makers or order books inside of the spread of automated market makers i i would argue that um the role of money the abstract rule of money is going to go away and

everything's going to be money joe i want to get your perspective on how this story of eath has evolved so far because you know we talk about ethan's money we talk about like ethan as like a triple point asset as as gas or you know store value for defy but i want to get your opinion as to what what was the consensus around ether the asset back in 2015 and how knowing how what we know now the the six year old history of ether and ethereum how to how has the path followed suit or not followed suit from the the mental models that you had back in the early days of ethereum like what what is surprising to you and what what is

something that you just expected um so there were things that we were thinking that we weren't saying um and we were initially not very disciplined in the first two or three months and then we got very disciplined about what we would say publicly after discussions with lawyers and so we crafted legal arguments to the effect that we would be selling a token that would not be considered by the sec a sale of uh an unregistered security uh to any americans uh and so um the characterization of ether as a crypto fuel was genuine is still genuine uh it

pays for storage and execution of computational steps on ethereum and we also really wanted to focus on the developer ethos where it was all about building and then biddling um and not so much about um early speculation uh so the speculation came in a few years later mostly in 2017 and that's great i mean we need speculators in our ecosystem we need um people actors with all sorts of interests in our ecosystem um but the fact that we established um the

developer ethos early uh was really important um and as i said earlier we uh we did anticipate uh many of the things that were happening we anticipated sharding in the first three days um i remember having a discussion about that we had a burn model that we were working on with respect to ether very early which presages 1559 so you know the execution has been remarkable um and it's incredibly difficult to stand up a technology top-down uh it has evolved beautifully um

by the agency of so many different actors with different expertise so seems to be going pretty well we've got a long way to go so joe for those not familiar with you know what futures listing regulator approved futures listing means in in the us we have a lot of retail listeners out there and they're probably not as familiar with kind of the traditional financial banking landscape but what does this mean for the financialization of ether as an asset or even the in in two institutions uh in their outlook on ether as an asset yeah so

um there has been astonishing movement in the bitcoin ecosystem um driven early on by people like my friend mike novogratz uh more recently by um paul tudor jones stanley dr miller and a handful of others who've jumped in um and recently michael saylor who i think wins mvp already for for 21 maybe for 20 as well late late 20 um so microstrategy uh has taken a very uh structured organized approach to pivoting almost their business model to uh uh to turn their balance sheet into a bitcoin museum uh where their

assets for bitcoin and borrowing money and buying bitcoin and uh so far i think that's gone very well for them um bitcoins volatile assets so uh um and i know they're very smart so that i expect they won't get into trouble but uh they're packaging up um the tremendous diligence that they did and the structured strategic um steps that they've followed and i think they mentioned it maybe a thousand or 1400 ceos and cfos were on their live stream and i'm sure um many more will be watching uh the recorded versions and so novogratz has been saying the herd is

coming uh for several years uh and by that he meant that uh the ethereum and bitcoin phenomenon uh was largely retail driven um and by the herd he meant that institutionals were getting more and more interested uh and uh the herd is now taking um university economics courses uh delivered by michael saylor and crew in how to um exist and thrive in the early days of the decentralized protocol system in the early days of d5 so [Music] with respect to futures options um

regulators in the united states um these organizations need to be prudent uh as they divest themselves of certain assets and invest in certain assets um there is likely a transformation going on and evolution going on between legacy or state-issued assets and newer decentralized protocol assets in different forms um and they need the as you said financial infrastructure they need instruments uh so that they can respond in real time if they want to put on a hedge or if they want to take advantage of an opportunity or you know if they want to

wire up a a lending driven financial flow in real time uh in d5 on ethereum so that that's coming real soon uh real organizations are getting serious about that um and bottom line uh they're not ready to hedge in defy on ethereum um but absolutely they you know they already have the accounts open uh they have for years or decades and uh um this moves cryptocurrencies into their wheelhouse and uh they know that uh the world is evolving much more rapidly than we all expected it to for certain reasons

and the smart ones the air ones are going to survive and thrive and if your head is buried and you for whatever reason uh aren't paying attention to or uh refusing to understand and acknowledge what's going on in our ecosystem then uh you're gonna have a wicked game of catch-up or find a another job or a career or something like that speaking of a wicked game of ketchup uh one thing that really interests me about this this futures release is that it took ether only five years to get futures yeah it took bitcoin nine and

like naturally bitcoin came first it has a harder fight to fight but ether ether got futures faster than faster than bitcoin did what what is your take away from that uh so i i would say thank you to bitcoin for being there first and taping the way significantly big bitcoin and and so you know the cme sibo others um air sacs especially have done a tremendous amount of work to to try to get the regulators comfortable with this it was weeks away a few years away and and regulators uh have put up uh uh hurdles or just slowed processes so um

uh built on the shoulders of giants uh and giants in our ecosystem um and i i think what you're saying has merit that uh uh i forget the exact wording of mr tarbert but uh he just said something like ethereum is awesome period stop something like that um and uh that's just a reflection of the understanding of people financial professionals who when they take the time to understand the technology are just astonished at all the problems that it will solve and all the opportunities that it will create and the frictions that it will eradicate and

um the financial flows that will get immediate and the agency that small organizations and individuals will have over their uh economic freedom their economic activity and their political activity you know joe on on bank list we've called bitcoin kind of the the gateway drug to crypto the gateway drug to d5 and um i wonder if you sort of see that playing out so you capture this moment in time where you've got michael saylor putting bitcoin on the microstrategy balance sheet we've just come off uh news this week where it turns out tesla stacked 1.5 billion worth of bitcoin in january and i was kind of struck by uh their sec filings where it sort of

disclosed that information that they said they would pursue a strategy to continue acquiring digital assets they didn't just say bitcoin they said digital assets so i you know i'm curious do you think that ether is just going to follow in that same path now that we've got regulator approvals like you know cme futures is either going to be the next thing that a public trade company like a microstrategy buys maybe they start staking it maybe a tesla buys ether as part of its digital strategy portfolio what's your take here yeah so i was a bitcoiner um then i encountered ethereum and was blown away by

how much more expressive and capable it would be and we've realized a lot of that vision um i like to think of both the bitcoin token and the ethereum token as high-powered money you may have called it uh permissionless bandwidth and those tokens are beautiful as they are ethereum adds onto both of those high-powered money foundations uh an astonishing layered complexity um or you know we will build an astonishing layered complexity of magic internet money protocol legos um and

uh that that's where the excitement lies uh so in staking in massively uh decentralizing these networks i expect that we will see many organizations uh contract two um with a cloud or or run their own infrastructure consensus offers a mining infrastructure sorry uh we do a little bit of mining but uh staking infrastructure which is i think uh what you're interested in uh in discussing uh and these uh foundational protocols um or at least ethereum um

serve as a platform for other kinds of platforms these other kinds of platforms are um what i've sometimes called collaboration networks and so we as individuals and organizations will be participating in a wide variety of collaboration networks that are built on platforms like ethereum and they will involve investing they will involve um holding tokens they will involve uh voting the governance rates on your tokens they will involve active treasury management they will involve setting goals for your collaboration network and raising money for your collaboration network and executing the work uh so

um all of those different functions that uh essentially sit in different companies right now are getting much more tightly integrated i'm not sure how that's going to play out other than by having much more granular groups of people responsible for that and the the boundaries between what we call companies uh sort of dissolving where i and you two will be part of lots of these collaboration networks for uh work or leisure or research and and so i fully expect that any organization that wants to

operate optimally and protect its interests will need to pay attention to many aspects of the emerging decentralized tokenized economy and so uh yeah treasury management um doesn't necessarily mean just financial aspects anymore or it won't soon there's something interesting about ether cme futures that is uniquely different than bitcoin futures because ether the asset and ethereum the platform have a roadmap right there are obstacles and objectives that we are going to get over as a community um like we mentioned eip1559 that has become a core component of ether the asset yet it is not yet

included and then we also have just the the further democratization of staking and then eat staking derivative tokens uh so there's plenty of upgrades to have to put into ether the asset ether the asset is set to have software updates but that's weird because the chicago mercantile exchange isn't it is a place to trade commodities and nowhere has there ever been a commodity on the cme that has gotten a software update right wheat doesn't get a software update bitcoin does not get software updates so how do you think how do you think about this comparison where like the the cme is trading this this asset that has like this road map and how do you see the ether roadmap specifically perhaps with eip1559 and then ether staking

derivatives how do you see that impacting the long-term just institutional models of understanding ether the asset so the first easy out answer to your question is that uh yes ether is the token and the commodity and just like the grain industry or the oil industry or the metals industry there are lots of companies that organize their own strategies and road maps around sourcing um refining packaging and delivering and utilizing uh those commodities so i i don't i can easily map our ecosystem onto those ecosystems um

but the more profound perhaps uh answer to your question is that uh things are shifting i mean the the old world has certain models and as i discussed before where these tokens aren't just money they represent a lot of different things um and um it's certainly a new kind of commodity um it is uh unprecedented and uh we're coming up so it's a paradigm shift it's uh um stated more intensely it's a clash of civilizations uh and hopefully it'll be a gentle evolutionary clash

but it's going to evolve us bringing forth um great exciting technology and showing uh the benefits of that technology um by a demonstration as uber has done and airbnb has done and then it's going to involve a discussion in various jurisdictions around the world about how they would like this technology to fit in and serve their particular civilization their particular society economy ethos it will serve uh sweden differently from how it will serve mainland china probably um and it's a powerful technology so i think it's

going to transform everything over time and it's even regulation in the united states uh it's going to involve um a lot of learning from regulators and some of them have done a great job already and it's going to involve a change in some of the rules just because lots of rules around financial regulation and compliance were designed to protect um consumers from custodians so if consumers are only using self-custody wallets and systems then [Music]

that some of that shouldn't apply or some of that should fall away potentially joe when we come back i want to talk to you more about this idea of the clashing of civilizations um but before we do we want to tell you a bit about the sponsors that made this episode possible synthetics is ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol what does that mean synthetics is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks traders can use the quenta exchange which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by synthetics traders on cuenta can trade synthetic tokens like sbtc s oil or sd5 because quinta is powered by

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money goes straight into your non-custodial wallet so your money is never held by a centralized intermediary because your monolith wallet is native to ethereum monolith helps you transcend both the legacy and the crypto worlds because the money that you hold in your monolith wallet has the power of d5 behind it swapping assets on unit swap or earning yield and defy is at your fingertips but with monolith so are the groceries at your grocery store or the coffee at your coffee shop go to monolith.xyz to sign up and get your monolith visa card today all right guys we are back with joe lupin joe um i want to talk about this comment that you made just just prior to our break where you talked about this clash of civilizations right and

i i want to unpack kind of what you mean there right because there are maybe many elements of of these civilizations that are clashing so the bankless dichotomy would be there's a bit of traditional finance versus this new decentralized finance we've also talked about kind of the the nation-state way of organizing things versus the protocol network state way of organizing things but what do you think about when you talk about this this clash of civilization what are the civilizations that are clashing here so what i was thinking about was uh something that uh is an older notion um and it's still relevant but uh uh early on uh several years ago um

before the project or um in the early days of the project um it it was at least clear to us that uh um we would need to be careful uh how we organized uh how we launched how we publicized uh how we executed the project there was a concerted effort to avoid the united states of america i sort of jumped back pretty quickly because i did want to operate there but there was a history of the united states of america not liking projects that created their own money

and so we thought it might be a bad idea to piss the united states off early on we'd land it at jfk and get tackled to the tarmac by the fbi and made an example of and so we did consciously avoid that for the first year while still engaging with american lawyers and we set up in switzerland because they cherish freedom and decentralization and they think of government as a service pretty much rather than a right and they negotiate with you so i had a great experience there and

things went remarkably well remarkably quickly we haven't made any horrible mistakes um but we were aware that uh well resourced vested interests would take notice of us at some point um we've been delighted at how many people in government and and industries really embrace these ideas and think they're valuable and are adopting them and supporting them but still uh we have been thinking that at some point we might run up against um organizations that have vested interests

that don't want to play that don't appreciate our existence and the transformation that we might represent and so uh we'll see that i think uh although this change wave is awfully powerful i i believe that ethereum as a technology because it's so much more expressive um has staying power um i didn't feel that bitcoin had the same staying power just because you don't really build much on it it's just everything's a belief system and bitcoin is much more of a belief system than a theorem is because you can just build a lot of functionality on uh on a theorem until the recent

activities where this belief system is being really strongly religiously adopted by major corporations in the united states um i i wasn't certain about bitcoin i'm pretty certain now and we we just need a lot of that so that bitcoin ether and other tokens other protocols are so embedded in the more fast-moving organizations like companies um you know similar to how uh uber and airbnb established themselves and succeeded and then dealt with the regulators after i think we're on a good trajectory and so

hopefully the clash of civilizations will be as gentle as it has been for uber and airbnb yeah absolutely so that this kind of leads into you a little bit of of you know what you're doing with consensus which i think is fascinating and fits into this right so it may be that as we call kind of government's the final boss the final boss the u.s government has not raised its head on ethereum because there are so many potential wins sure sure for well they have in some ways but but there are also like lots of wins they've been pretty positive yeah yeah yeah and exactly so like uh when the usc's uh maybe it's it's geopolitical adversary like china create its own closed private blockchain type solution um well it is

adversarial but adversarially beneficial for the world to have a more open transparent linux type ethereum type open uh ledger so can you talk about what consensus is doing maybe with respect to stable coins and how governments around the world particularly like free open democratic government governments um think about ethereum and the winds that they can get from an open ledger like ethereum yeah so we've done a fair amount of work um to bring the ethereum technology into the central bank digital currency context we worked with two central banks uh over time in the past and we're working with

four currently and i think we're about to add three more um and they're different use cases that we're exploring uh and it's early days for most of them uh certainly china and a couple other nations are are earliest in in rolling out uh pilot systems um others are are really quite in in the early stages so the use cases are things like cross-border payments or retail payments so just payments by consumers and the ethereum technology is getting real interest which is exciting um one argument that uh that we've been

trying to make in certain contexts and we made it in the the context of the united states is that uh yeah it's nice to to roll out your central bank digital currency on the next generation of technology that just makes sense but if you really think about it this is likely or can be the foundation of your economy and we're in a moment where we're transitioning everything we do from analog and frictional forms to natively digital frictionless forms whether it's identity or reputation or money or other kinds of digital assets [Music] and when you do that

clearing and settlement happens in the instance of the transaction and you squeeze all the delays out of your system and if you're squeezing all the delays out of these uh different financial transactions uh you're essentially compounding the creation of value much more closely over time and so you're likely to grow value in your ecosystem much faster so why would you want to build uh a money only uh blockchain platform or near blockchain platform for your cbdc central bank digital currency when you can build something with smart contracts and it can serve as your nation-state blockchain which interoperates with [Music]

public mainnet blockchains we do need public mainnet blockchains i think nation states can and will and should have their own nation-state infrastructure sort of think of it as a a subnet and different regions within a nation-state uh can and probably should do that sort of thing but we're going to need a global settlement layer for digital assets that that everybody can trust especially as [Music] as nation states have issues with one another uh as i think we're gonna increasingly see over the next uh decade or so so i um even if even if these

nations states uh do have issues they should be able to enter into agreements they should be able to stake value in these agreements and there should be impartial judges that can potentially judge when something bad happens and slash stakes so there should be um you know treaties uh can be executed on blockchains and most of the time when these nation states make agreements with one another um there isn't much um enforcement power unless you decide to do something really destructive um yeah could not agree more with that like so dave and i have talked about so so much in bankless how ethereum kind of provides this credibly

neutral substrate for the world and it it can solve human global international coordination problems that we couldn't previously solve joe i feel like we could get you on an entire episode to talk about all of the other things that consensus is doing um you know because there's so much from metamasks to infuriate all of these other things but if you could see you next week yeah and that should be like a three hour long episode but if you could just pick one thing right now just one maybe project something interesting that uh you know is brewing at consensus that uh bankless listeners would be interested in what would you what would you talk about today uh it's a hard one let me let me just go with our approach um so

we've built um a blockchain stack um the most dominant or utilized blockchain stack uh in the ethereum ecosystem and the blockchain ecosystem that consists of quorum for enterprise with the built essentially on two different uh ethereum clients geth and hyperledger basu uh above that we have infura and truffle and diligence which is our security audit group that also produces software so that's an infrastructure layer that services developers and metamask sits on top of that with

i think we're at 1.8 million monthly active users now in metamask so that that's consumer um facing and it's also b2b2c as we launch the snaps plug-in architecture we have a group that is building applications uh we call that group commerce and decentralized finance group and they are able to launch applications for consumers and make them available make the apis available to developers through infiera and truffle and also for some of them make those financial instruments or financial flows or other services available to enterprise as enterprise gets more and more excited about lining their treasuries with uh with ether

and so the first really exciting application of all of that is is launching something called metaswaps uh and so we will be metaphobs um off the charts in terms of its success in in bringing uh uniform interface to uh swapping tokens and and great pricing so you're getting everything uh that you need in metamask rather than going to different uh aggregators or dexes um we also have private market makers involved um and we're going to be doing that for a whole bunch of products and services for for those three cohorts consumers developers and enterprise so long-winded

but uh meta swaps is exciting and much more to come joe i think everyone in the bankless nation in the broader ethereum community at large has to thank for thank you for everything you've done at consensus building out what makes the bankless nation tick like some of this infrastructure we wouldn't be able to have this podcast without some of the infrastructure that came out of consensus as a as a long-standing veteran of this crypto industry and of and have seen many many bull markets i want to ask this final question before we sign off here i'm what i'm trying to get my head around is like how big this bull market's about to be right and like i'm i'm trying to like keep myself calm and like not get out over my skis and not just like get too bullish just because

other people are getting bullish but the world's richest man just bought 1.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin so like on the richter scale of bull markets like can can you like what are you feeling like how are you measuring this thing um yeah so one should always be careful and markets have a characteristic ebb and flow normally i don't think of this as a bull market i think of it as a a global paradigm shift um and it's gonna be a new way of organizing all of the systems on the planet on new sounder um

trust foundations and we're building financial infrastructure on that new sound trust foundation everything else can be re-architected much better on top of that um you don't see assets power in such straight lines um for quite long times unless something is going on so i think we were already in the middle of a paradigm shift and that paradigm shift is now surfing um the perfect wave which is uh caused by the perfect storm of covid and uh financial bubbles of all kinds i mean we're at the end of 70 plus year debt super cycle

that's how the system was organized and uh um people have recognized that and are fed up about that and it's broken so broken anyway that a new paradigm has to occur so um i won't say that i'm bullish but something's going on no i think that smile says everything we need and it it has been fantastic having you on the bank list podcast we really appreciate it all the work that you've done in this space and you've definitely foreseen many of these things before they happened um congratulations to everyone in the ethereum community

on cme eth futures this is a massive milestone and joe thanks for coming on and sharing it with us yeah so thanks to you guys too you guys are are such a smart entertaining breath of fresh air and such wonderful energy um uh i'm very grateful uh for the work that you guys do and i know that the ecosystem loves you well we appreciate it joe we've got to get some kind of fun yeah it is fun if we just do this to learn and um there's no place i would rather be and i think david feels the same we both feel like we work for the community for the protocol um as i know you do well fantastic guys thanks joe once again wrists and disclaimers of course we talked a little bit about the bull

market there but you have to keep in mind none of that was financial advice none of this is financial advice as always never ever right david uh crypto is risky so is defy you could lose what you put in but we are head west this is absolutely the frontier and we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot