Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Will stablecoins end the US debt Crisis?

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin joins Friederike Ernst to discuss why we are at the "end of a supercycle," a chaotic transition period where legacy institutions are finally adopting blockchain rails not just for efficiency, but for survival. They explore the "inevitable convergence" where the US government may actively rely on stablecoins to absorb debt, effectively using crypto to extend the lifespan of the dollar. At the same time, banks scramble to compete with self-custodial wallets. Joe also details the structural evolution of Consensys, from an "organic blob" incubating projects like Gnosis to a focused software powerhouse. He differentiates Linea from competitors by highlighting its commitment to permissionless innovation where anyone can deploy a rollup without a "sign-off". He shares his vision for MetaMask evolving into a user-owned "full-service bank. Topics00:00 Intro & Paradigm Shift04:15 Crypto-Anarchy vs. Enterprise10:30 Banks & Stablecoins16:00 The Economic Supercycle24:45 Consensys History & Spin-outs33:20 Linea & Decentralization42:15 L1 Scaling & ZK48:00 Permissionless Rollups55:30 Future OptimismLinksJoe Lubin on X: https://twitter.com/ethereumJosephConsensys: https://consensys.ioLinea: https://linea.buildMetaMask: https://metamask.ioGnosis: https://gnosis.io/ Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Anz, and today I'm speaking with Joe Lubin, who is the co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensus. There's been a tremendous surge in our ecosystem and a lot more respect for permissionless innovation. Banks are panicking. Organizations related to banks are trying to figure out what a world looks like, where you can essentially, have a full-service bank owned by you in your pocket on your phone. If I were a bank, I would adopt blockchain just for efficiency gains, right? So any bank would and should.

So what we're going to be doing is furthering decentralization, decentralized proving, decentralized sequencing, and figuring out ways to share some value creation, some of the revenue with token holders. And I think we can build a token economy or sub-economy with a lot of, with a lot of linear networks that are independent, quasi-independent, or closely related to one another, that are collaborating with one another, that are sharing infrastructure. That's the vision currently for Linnea.

Hey, Joe, thank you so much for coming back on again. Dr. Ernst, thank you for having me. One of my favorite podcasts, and you are my favorite podcast interviewer. You're making me blush. You're the best. Cool. Maybe let's start with kind of some bird's eye questions. So if you, I mean, you've been in crypto an extraordinary long time.

Web 3 values have shifted, right? Kind of you came into Web 3 after the 2008 financial crisis. I remember you were telling me how you drove across Argentina to see whether you could buy up land in anticipation of kind of... Peru and Ecuador, but yes. Sorry, kind of in anticipation of this imminent collapse of the global financial system. And now all the banks are on chain, right?

So kind of Web 3 was supposed to be this ownership revolution and kind of what we're getting to some extent is this back-end upgrade for Wall Street. And I mean, kind of like, I can see it from the perspective of the legacy players, right? Kind of if I were a bank, I would adopt blockchain just for efficiency gains, right? So any bank would and should. This episode is brought you by NOSIS, building the open internet one block at a time. NOSIS was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects

into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. NOSIS is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that are so many others like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is Nosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like NOSIS pay and circles. All this is governed by NOSISDAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like,

start exploring atnosis.io. The deeper question that kind of plagues me is, are we at risk of losing the paradigm shift kind of that was meant to be inherent to kind of Web 3 if the user experience, rails and distribution end up owned by the same old incumbents? Yeah, I think if there's any. risk and there's a huge amount of risk in the world right now. It's the risk of the paradigm shift accelerating. I started in the blockchain space when it was called Bitcoin in early 2011 and it was crypto anarchic. It was a bunch of people who were technologists and they drew in

people who were very paranoid and very protective of their own assets and I think that ethos has significantly prevailed in the Bitcoin space. There were other projects, starting in 2011, 2012, etc. Colored coins, Mastercoin, counterparty, a whole lot of them. Next was an interesting one that essentially added functions to the protocol rather than pursuing Vitalik's idea, which was to add a computationally complete computer. to every node of a decentralized network. And so that was all about builders, recognizing that this profound invention of Satoshi, decentralized trust, was something that should be everywhere

and used in as many cases as possible, not just in the narrow use case of money or store value, some aspects of money. And so there was a, There were certainly a bunch of crypto anarchist types early in the Ethereum ecosystem. But I think a lot of the early builders were really pragmatic. And many of us felt that this is great. We can transform the world to greater and greater, call it progressive decentralization.

Permissionlessly, nobody can stop us. You know, we're anti-fragile, the U.S. government to eat. even can try to kill us for years in a row. And ultimately, we would just get stronger from those attacks, but move a little more slowly. And so it was all about building enough functionality, usability, usability, scalability, et cetera, so that we could just change everything ourselves if we needed to.

And then maybe the older generations, the older cohort. would die off and the younger people would be crypto, token native, etc. But we really did, many of us really did feel that unless the whole world on boards to progressive decentralization, the paradigm shift will not be nearly as effective. And so early on, consensus and a bunch of organizations in our ecosystem, did enterprise blockchain to form the enterprise Ethereum alliance, and the technology was used for consortium chains and things like that.

And a bunch of years ago, we declared that enterprise Ethereum is dead, but long-lived enterprise Ethereum because the layer two roll-up roadmap, map was invented and has grown remarkably successful, in my opinion. And so, you know, is a whole bunch of banks and their customers, worse than some of the exploitative things that we've seen going on in the meme coin space. I would argue the ICO space was remarkably period era was remarkably successful, but a lot of shenanigans in that era as well. And so I really do look forward to onboarding major financial institutions, major enterprises around the world and with things like prediction markets, which you

know a little bit about and other things going mainstream. I think TradFi is onboarding itself to Defi. It'll soon all be called finance and that's going to be running on. our rails. Yeah, I think that's inevitably happening. But if you look at the promise of Web3, and kind of if you look back over the last 15 years, and you would have to point that kind of a tangible metric that's gotten better for real life people because kind of their banks now use blockchain in the background, what would you say that is? Because kind of to me, the value proposition was to a large extent that these intermediaries are no longer necessary and kind of they are no longer in a position where they can very effectively extract from their users,

right? Yeah. So the intermediaries essentially are disintermediated and turned into protocols or their functionality is replaced by protocols. And so I think we've always been about a growing agency, personal, political, social, economic agency for people and for communities. Companies are kind of communities too, so they should have agency. And if you look at what's been going on since the end of the Biden-O-Pen

and Gensler administration, whatever that was, there's been a tremendous surge in our ecosystem and a lot more respect for permissionless innovation. The Stable Coin Genius Act lit a fire under our ecosystem. Stable coins growing and proliferating are a total game changer for banking. Banks are panicking. Organizations related to banks are trying to figure out what a world looks like, where you can essentially have a full service bank owned by you in your pocket on your phone. Nosis is doing that. Mennemask is doing that. And how do regional banks survive and thrive in that sort of context?

context. How does Swift, for instance, provide services to 11,500 financial institutions using enhanced technology? And so we're talking to lots of banks and we're working with Swift and there's some really good answers to that. So it is not the case that you're going to need to be custodying the assets of your customers in order to provide services to them and make a living if you're a financial institution. Other financial institutions could potentially achieve charters. And we're going to need some government cooperation on this around being data custodians. identity, reputation custodians, attestation custodians. A project portfolio company called Spruce ID is working, doing some great work on this stuff. And so it's going to take time for the general population to get more comfortable with DFI.

So DFI is probably one of the first killer ops of the world ledger, as Ethereum has sort of re-articulated as Vatallix re-articulated Ethereum, pulling it back a little bit temporarily from calling it the world computer. Vitalik is also articulated that he believes that

low-risk defy is now something that could be considered by even naive people because the financial system, the global economy, is in danger right now.

We're at the end of a super cycle, and there is great risk in holding nation-state currencies in certain bank accounts, and the risk might be more severe in terms of financial repression where inflation just erodes the purchasing power of the savings of people and companies. And so holding your own assets under your own control

in your own personal bank, and exposing them to yield and investment opportunities in an ecosystem that has been growing exponentially for the last 10 or 15 years may be a good idea compared to being exposed financially to a global economy that is careening towards a brick wall in the form of the end of a super cycle. So I'm very optimistic that we're going to move into the next super cycle. that will be heavily supercharged by AI and will be operating on decentralized rails. But there are ways to bring the legacy infrastructure along for the ride. A lot of the stables that we see today in Web3 are just wrappers for legacy currencies, right?

So kind of USDC and USCT are backed and supposedly probably backed one-to-one by US dollars in some sort of escrow custodian account. So kind of like if the US dollar kind of creans towards the edge, what does that mean for a defa a defy landscape that is very heavily built on these transpositions? Yeah, if it creans towards the left. edge, it could be concerning. So I think of backed stable coins to be a tremendous validation of our technology, also an existential threat potentially to our technology, as you've suggested. I think of it as a transitionary step. I would love to see, I would love to see and die

continue on its pure path. Liquity is. a very cool protocol that makes use of decentralized economic bandwidth, basically in the form of ether or other decentralized instruments, serving as collateral so that you can, it's a complicated ecosystem, but you can basically lend yourself some stable coin against your own collateral. And that's an incredibly important construct, but we need ether to go through the roof and price. We need Bitcoin to go through the roof and price in order to be able to mint enough stable coins based on that mechanism. In the meantime, there's really interesting political economic transformations underway where China, some other countries are going to have to pull back. on lending money to the United States.

Japan's raising rates and is probably going to pull back a bunch of its money and throw the world into a much less carry trade-driven world. That should be very interesting. And Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, has crafted a strategy where the U.S. can borrow money from many organizations around. around the world that are effectively involved in doing genius compliant stable coins. And they're either putting dollars in the bank or holding U.S. treasuries in custody, one backing stable coins one for one.

And I think the United States government is going to be very aggressive about that strategy. Scott Bessent indicated he thought probably hit $3 trillion in stables. And so that is a transitionary political, economic phenomenon or moment that embraces our technology, drives our technology forward, drives the price of ether and Bitcoin higher, much higher, hopefully. Enabling, we don't need a full replacement of backed stable coins in our ecosystem. We just need to bootstrap properly decentralized stable coins in our ecosystem. A really nice side effect for people around the world in countries that are, say, more problematic than Germany or the United States is that if you have a despot who is financially exploiting the population via monetary mechanisms or getting into deep debt and financially repressing the population, printing much too much money, it's great to have either tokens like Ether or Bitcoin. or stable coins that are tracking the U.S. dollar or other denominations to put your money in. In some cases, you need to hide your money from family members that might take it from you.

In other cases, you just need to protect yourself from the governments. And if governments lose their ability to financially exploit their populations, we could see some positive political ramifications. I know I'm saying this at a moment of extreme chaos in the world. We are at the end of an 80-something year super cycle. And a lot of stuff is breaking and kind of has to break. That's what happens at the end of super cycles so that the new system of the next super cycle can establish itself. So what do you recommend for the ecosystem to kind of build in and as a

of this collapse because kind of like currently we're kind of transposing a lot of the old mechanisms on Shane and they will just collapse with the old mechanisms, right? So what do you what do you think is the infrastructure and the projects we need to kind of see us through this? So I think keeping a bunch of the old mechanisms as healthy as possible to facilitate as smooth a transition for humans as possible is a good thing. like smashing into a brick wall would be bad. And doing that sort of thing might make it easier for nefarious actors

who have guns and things to take control of a very broken situation. So I think we need to remain as functional as possible while organizations like ours continue to build infrastructure, scalability applications that they can enable people to transition to the next economy. And so what are we building? We're building wallets that people fully own and control. We're building decentralized finance so that people can participate in funding the development of the next economy and can.

and earn yield as the next economy accelerates. Because money in the next economy, even though it's nearly free to print magic internet money, it's the really good ones are valuable, are scarce, and they earn pretty good yield if you're trying to acquire them, borrow them for different things. So our ecosystem is likely to see pretty good yields compared to the legacy economy.

We'll see how that goes, but it looks like we're going to move into another accelerated money printing phase. And building things that enable people to express themselves better. Prediction markets are a great one that we've talked about for many years that enable the world. of people who think they know the truth about different issues to incentivize the people who actually know the truth, to share the truth, sort of like a consulting fee. I think that's going to be great. I think we're going to have a lot of revelations over the next few years about all the shenanigans and just utter rot that sits at the core of our political cultures. So looking forward to that. And I think it's going to be about empowerment to do things. I think the social media,

social networking industrial complex is unbelievably toxic. And, you know, it drives polarization. I think if you look at the people in small town Germany and the small town America, they're probably isolated from a bunch of the madness that we, think is the state of the world if we're paying attention to Twitter and certain elements of mainstream or social media. I actually think that a lot of the polarization and the narrative around collapse of the system of the world. I think a lot of that is a manufactured narrative. Yes, there are big changes going on. But I think there are owners of all the different industrial complexes,

whether it's social media or educational or scientific publishing or pharma or food or military. And so we do live in a manufactured reality. And the opportunity is for reality to become a little more decentralized. if we start building applications on decentralized rails, like blockchains, if we start building applications on decentralized networks of decentralized social graphs, where our decentralized identities are wired together

via attestations and reputation systems and when there are platforms, where we can add content to our social graphs, tokenize our social graphs, earn money, could add functionality to our social graphs. We can, the owner of a social graph can earn tokens, potentially the owner can share those tokens with people contributing value to the social graph. And so it shouldn't be the big corporate owners and making use of AI to exploit us,

who are making money from user-generated content. it should be the people who are in control of all that and benefiting from that. And we need a lot of infrastructure building in order to make that happen. But as soon as they're good platforms and people can start making a living and feeling like they're not being manipulated and driven a bit crazy from plugging into social networks, I think there will probably be a flippening of how people engage in social. social networking going forward. So I look forward to the big social network companies shrinking quite dramatically. That sounds like a wonderful vision for the future. And it sounds a lot like

kind of like this ownership narrative, right? Kind of like this. It's a platform. It belongs to no one. Thus it belongs to everyone narrative, right? Where there's not one central counterparty or one bottleneck that kind of sits in a position where kind of they can. You need blockchain characteristics. You need guaranteed execution, permissionless innovation, mentorship, resistance. And we need scalability. We've gotten to the point where we're really close to having good scalability. Yeah, I want to talk about scalability in just a bit.

But maybe kind of like if you look at applications we see so far, mostly we see yield applications where somehow Web2 yield or Web2 financial stack yield is redistributed to kind of Web 3 protocols, right? So kind of the yield on Stables comes from the fact that kind of they are, they buy T-bills and kind of then rather than I'm kind of eating this up themselves, they kind of somehow redistributed to the defi users or the low-risk DFI users. Where do you see the, where do you see the applications that actually give back ownership to users of their data, their identity, their audience, their content.

Because I mean, I know all the experiments, but none of them have really caught on, right? It is transitional. We're in a transitional phase. When cars were invented, there were laws where people had to walk in front of the cars, like they walked in front of horses and carriages. And that's because the roads maybe couldn't handle fast. cars moving down them. When TV was invented, nobody knew what to do with it. So people stood up with their scripts and they read radio plays in front of the cameras. Do you think we get there? Yeah, of course I think we'll get there. Maybe I'm just impatient. So I mean, the patience has

never been my prime virtue. Most people don't see the world in terms of flows. If you look at crypto Twitter, everybody's looking at a slice of time. And whether their tokens are up today or down today, and either the sky is falling or everything is great. And so if you start paying attention to the flows and we've made unbelievable progress since 2009 or 2014 for Ethereum, a civilization has now effectively started embracing in earnest decentralized protocol. So we're seeing it at consensus because we're talking to governments and big companies, especially in the financial industry. And they are all asking for help in understanding this stuff or in building on this stuff. Maybe let's talk about consensus for a bit.

So kind of consensus is an unusual company, to say the least, right? So if you were starting, if you were to start consensus again today with kind of, of everything you've learned over the past decade, more than a decade. Would you replicate kind of this hub and spoke structure that you pioneered back then? I spent a year roughly on the Ethereum project, helping with a whole lot of people to stand up, the Ethereum Project, the Ethereum Foundation, et cetera. And I think it's important to note that, because we did talk to some very, VCs back then. And we did make the explicit decision not to take VC money directly. VCs

for free to invest in the token launch, but we felt like we had to be a very different kind of project, a different kind of organization. It had to be as decentralized as we could make it and progressively decentralize it. And the token sale had to be open, free, and fair. And we did a lot of legal work to make sure that we wouldn't get into trouble in the United States if we allowed Americans to participate and got a piece of paper from a law firm that gave us confidence that we could go ahead and do that. And that has stood up despite attempts to tear it down. and we didn't hire in the sense that we didn't put up job wrecks, job descriptions and things like that. Basically anybody who wanted to self-select to become part of the Ethereum project,

they were virtually instantly on the Ethereum project. And so it was a band of pirates, band of characters. characters. Sometimes there were issues, interpersonal issues, but I don't think that Ethereum would have been seen to be open, permissionless, and something that moves towards civilization-scale technology if we were a company, like a traditional company to start. And so a year into it, I wanted to do something essentially based in the United States because Ethereum people were afraid of the United States back then, but I was a little less afraid. And it was about continuing the vision in the mission of the Ethereum project. And we knew that we couldn't design an ecosystem, whether from the Ethereum Foundation or from consensus, we couldn't design the Deuterum Foundation or from consensus.

We couldn't design the decentralized protocol world top down. We had to just do a ton of experimenting. So it was pretty decentralized and people made fun of it because we were trying to figure out how to govern ourselves and what to build with the technology. We tried to build an accounting system. We tried to build a DAP store. And we realized, hey, we have no developer tools.

We had no ecosystem, really. And so why don't we build a little infrastructure to enable us to interact with this raw technology? So MetaMask emerged from that and Inferra emerged from that. And Truffle emerged because Tim Coulter was trying to build a DAP store and just the scripts that he built in order to build an application ended up evolving into a pretty useful. developer tool that was used by many for many years. So consensus has been different organizations over the years. So there's an initial mothership company called Consensus Mash, and it went through a bunch of pretty powerful or radical evolutions in its nature. It paid a lot of attention to enterprise at the interim for a while. Some projects spun out because of the COVID-

challenges of consensus mesh to form consensus software. And it's been a very tight integrated software product company, extremely different from the organic blob that consensus mesh was and had to be because early on, mesh was all about fostering adoption, educating, talking to anybody who would listen to us, and incubating a huge number of projects, many of which including nosis, spun out of consensus, some with great success, some with not so great success, but we did seed a lot of activity in the Ethereum ecosystem. And so we have a lot of friends out there in the extended consensus network. I think it's completely uncontentious that so much value has come out of consensus over the years for Ethereum.

And I think you're 100% spot on that Ethereum needed a business to kind of drive adoption. If you look at the individual parts that kind of make up consensus, and I think I kind of maybe I look at this because I feel sometimes we're kind of like in a similar, albeit much smaller, boat. So kind of would, do you think some of the projects would have been better off kind of on their own rather than as part of this often unwieldy mothership structure? The social contract back then was that you could spin out. You know, it had to make sense

and it had to be pretty broad agreement. But a lot of projects got financial and other support to spin out of consensus. And I think we we spun out over 40 projects that it were incubated inside a consensus and invested in in many others that weren't incubated inside a consensus. Projects like Metamask spent a lot of time figuring out not just what their business model should be, but if they should have a business model. So there was a lot of interest early on in just setting up a foundation and treating Metamask as a public good, and don't worry about making, turning it into a for-profit endeavor. And the reason that, so Metamask had pretty good distribution starting in 20, late 20, 21 as DFI happened, and then the NFT phenomenon happened.

and the only reason Metamask ended up being in a position to make money was because we absorbed a team called AirSwap. And they were the people that built the infrastructure that enabled us to charge for swapping and have added a lot of features since then. So would Metamask have been better? Maybe the world would have been better off if Metamask remained a public good in the world? infrastructure, and maybe it's moving in that direction already, actually, because we're trying to progressively decentralize a bunch of the elements of consensus. I think you were better off spinning out because... Yeah, 100%.

Back then, I thought that you all could become a hub. in the same way that consensus was a sort of hub-and-spoke like model, and you've done an amazing job of that, building a bunch of integrated, very valuable components, and so already massively successful, and I think your future is going to be very, very bright as we all move into the mainstream. So we could go through a lot of examples,

but I think, you know, roughly we made pretty good decisions along the way. Yeah, so, I mean, we were the first spin-out, I think. And... Yeah, and... Yeah, and... Yeah, and... Yeah, no regrets. So I think it worked out way for us and you guys.

So it's... Yeah. So the two big pillars inside content is right now, linear and MetaMask, right? I mean, so there are still big pillars. that are less visible, like in Fuera, for instance, and diligence and so on. But talk me through linear and Metamask first. So kind of how do you see them fit together, reinforce each other, or kind of do you see them as somewhat orthogonal?

Metamask, as I already articulated, we're seeing as your cell-owned personal wallet in your pocket or on your laptop. And we think that Metamask can become a full-service bank. We think we can start speaking ISO-2022 like other banks and become infrastructure, not just for people and communities and companies. I think some of it could become decentralized and become sort of back-end infrastructure as well. Linea is a technology. It is leading ZK EVM technology.

We're hoping to see it natively enshrined in the Ethereum protocol at some point in the not too distant future. And with the pace of innovation of real-time ZK proving, things are looking like Ethereum is going to get remarkably scalable. It's going well. And we're hoping Linnea is a big part of that. the scaling issue. So kind of Ethereum has kind of

in the past couple of years kind of had this paradigm around L2 scaling, right? But now kind of it looks like L1 scaling

may actually come much faster than we had we had originally anticipated with real time proving and it looks like possibly

the true bottleneck is networking, which would be wonderful. How do you see that and how do you see that in context of the L2 landscape? How do you foresee the future evolving here? So we'll have to get back to that initial thread, but let me run with this one. I think scaling has all been enabled by the roll-up centric roadmap. We were trying to scale Ethereum in different ways, plasma sharding, etc. And we simply didn't have the technology to get that done in the pure layer one context.

And so the roll-up-centric roadmap gave a lot of really smart people and entrepreneurs' permission and incentives to take approaches, whether they're optimistic approaches or zero-knowledge approaches to building out scalability. Ethereum layer one seeded its pricing power for a while and made explicit. choices in the protocol to enable roll-ups to establish themselves and flourish and really build out the technology. Back when we, so we have a protocols group that produces an execution client called Basu and Teku, a consensus client, and we've been building clients for a long time, as have you, for the Ethereum Protocol. all. And we've always had an R&D group in our protocols group. And the R&D group was doing a

bunch of work six or so years ago, maybe longer, in zero knowledge proof technology. A couple, three years into that, it started to become clear that, hey, we think we could build a roll up because the technology is moving much faster than we thought it would. And so that's been accelerating exponentially since then. We built Linnea. Linea has been accelerating exponentially. Linea, today is Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025, otherwise known as Vesaka Day. And traditionally, Linnea has been out of sync with the hard forks.

But Linnea has been improving its process all along. And over the last few months, we've implemented four, five different hard forks. And for the first time, we're actually launching Fusaka for Linnea on the same day as the rest of the world, which is a really remarkable feat, in my opinion. And so we're seeing Justin Drake demonstrated that the two GPUs are able to real-time prove. some blocks. I'm not sure which blocks they were proving. And so we're getting to the point, and this is something that we anticipated in our R&D group years ago, that not only is ZK going to be the direction of travel for layer two's, but ZK is going to be used horizontally in messaging,

and ZK is going to make its way into the core protocol. And if consensus wanted to be a core protocol company and we would have to be expert with ZK. And so it's all working out in that direction, it looks like. And I think we're going to see a very fast, very performative layer one for Ethereum that has very useful things for layer two to do. And it's all saturated by super fast ZK real-time proving accelerated by hard. at some point soon. I think layer two's, layer threes, layer fours and higher are going to have real utility. They're going to represent gaming domains or topical domains or regional domains. It's possible that the country of France may not want to share a layer two with the country

of the United States because it would want to divide some, have some political divisions for for its provinces and United States might have political divisions and Switzerland isn't going to want to have a bunch of data leaked outside of its national layer two borders. So there are a lot of good reasons for the prolup-centric roadmap architecture to be incredibly useful and valuable for the next economy and the next geopolitical. map. The anti-network states. Exactly. Love it. So do you want me to go back to talking about what Linnea is? I sort of described matter.

Yes. Yeah. Go back to Linnea. I think that's a good idea. Yeah. So Linnae is a technology. Lina is a network. Linnea main net. And we're putting lots of effort into that. We've tokenized, we've decentralized it into a linear consortium. We've got stewards from across the ecosystem. We're adding one steward that we're about to announce in a few days, so don't want to front run that. And these stewards are very aligned with the health of the Ethereum ecosystem and obviously the linear ecosystem as well. of a giant ecosystem development fund in the form of the linear tokens. And the linear consortium and technology is available for others to build on.

So Swift consensus is building on the linear technology for Swift. We're working out our privacy technology. And we think we're going to be able to do something pretty profound. between Metamask and Linea connecting to one another via ZK, maybe not best in class, but one of the best in class privacy solutions. So we think that Linea itself has a business model. It is credibly neutral, permissionless innovation.

We don't control it, but we're leaning heavily into making it successful. So between Infura, which is decentralized, itself into DIN, decentralized infrastructure network. So Cervoir protocols enabling the range of metamast to grow as fast as the ecosystem grows, as fast as protocols can onboard themselves to decentralized infrastructure network. Inferra is helping DIN out quite significantly. And DIN is run, design founded by EG. Galano, who is a founder of Infura.

And so between those different elements, what we're looking to do is what traditional companies have done, verticalized. And so how do we verticalize in a way that is different and much better for everybody than the way the Web 2 Waldgarden company is verticalized? We do it while maintaining as much credible neutrality at each layer as we can. So there are things that we can do that unlock synergies between Medamask and Linneau, and some will be forthcoming. Don't want to front run those things, but things like our new rewards platform makes use of both, and there will be more on that front. But we have to figure out how to maintain the balance between some useful verticalization

to make products better for people and companies. and making sure there's credible neutrality so that nobody feels like they can be deplatformed by us. And everybody feels like there's a long tail of innovation where they can build in the metamass context, build in the linear context, build in the din context, and just add value to the ecosystem. And nothing we can do to stop that

and lots we can do to foster that. I think this is something that the ecosystem often doesn't give you enough credit for. And you probably get a PR briefing document before every interview you do that says, don't compare yourselves to competitors. Because I know this is what I get. But maybe I can do this. So kind of on linear, you can deploy your own roll-up without permission from you guys.

Whereas kind of like if you look at the other major stacks, it's actually very much not permissionless. You actually need sign-off from optimism. to kind of launch an OP stack roll-up. And I think most people aren't actually aware of this. And it's crazy, right? Kind of like this shouldn't be, yeah. It's a business model.

And if it works for them, it's fine and not crazy. So what we're going to be doing is furthering decentralization, decentralized proving, decentralized sequencing, et cetera, figuring out ways to share some value creation, some of the revenue generation with token holders, linear token holders, and maybe it's just through burning more linear tokens. And I think we can build a token economy or sub-economy with a lot of linear networks that are independent, quasi-independent, or closely related to one another,

that are collaborating with one another, that are sharing infrastructure. And I think that's how the next geopolitical landscape gets built out, somewhat bottom up with a lot of projects showing up and finding synergies and co-locating on different networks. And lots of those projects will be on multiple networks and will be citizens of many different network states. the vision currently for Linnea? Yeah, I mean, permission is innovation and true composability, I think that that'll be a huge unlock. One last thing.

We would like our relationship to Linnea to be very similar as our relationship to Ethereum, that Linnea should be as Ethereum aligned as possible, 100% Ethereum compatible. And maybe there's a time, when the architectures can evolve so that maybe overflow activity at layer one gets handled by different layer two networks. So I think we'll see quite a bit of architectural evolution over the next decade or two. Absolutely.

So we probably have time for one more question, and I want to make it a good one. So if you kind of, I mean, you are a remarkable optimist and a pessimist at the same time. So maybe do the doom thing. So kind of what keeps you up at night about the ecosystem? So kind of what do you think is the one thing kind of we need to get right in the next one or two years? So kind of are you worried about validator centralization or custodians or L2 Interop? What are you worried about? Well, I'm not worried about anything specifically related to the evolution of our ecosystem

because the ecosystem is so big and anti-fragile and self-sustaining. We've gotten over a lot of very difficult humps, and it's hard building civilizational infrastructure in the middle of a civilization that doesn't care or wants to kill you. But we've made remarkable progress. There are so many technical issues in our ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem. But we're aware of most of it or all of it. And there are so many parallel efforts to solve all these different issues, whether it's throughput or latency or composability.

These are just obvious things that really just require engineering solutions. There's nothing existentially difficult about these things. We just have to keep working on them. And we've got the wind at our backs now. U.S. government wind at our backs. Much of the globe is following the U.S. in terms of getting more comfortable legally with the technology and the mainstream. So we don't have any users yet.

We don't have any applications yet. And that's, I think, largely because of scalability and usability issues and because it was effectively illegal to do things in our ecosystem in the United States, illegal for companies to hold tokens or issue tokens, illegal for builders to build something innovative because the SEC would slap a lawsuit on you if you started to look successful. But now it's legal, and everybody's, all the organizations are trying to figure out how to rush in, and the builders are coming. So we're going to see so much innovation in terms of building novel things, largely in Defi, hopefully in social and gaming and other things in our ecosystem. So hopefully the global economy will hold itself together in 20,000. 26. If it does, it'll be an epic year for the Ethereum ecosystem. Cool. Joe, thank you so much for coming on. Where do we send people to find out more about you, our consensus, metamask, linear, all the wonderful things you're doing?

Ethereum Joseph on Twitter, consensus.io on the interweb. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thanks, Frederick.