Ethereum cofounder explains why ETH DATs are built to last

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]I can tell you nothing. Every year in the Ethereum timeline is interesting.

[00:00:05]It's constant innovation. Innovations tend to drive irrational exuberance and blow up [music] tops. I think we have an amazing opportunity and a concurrent threat. [music] It's going to be messy for a little while, but we're moving into what could be [music] considered a golden age. It may be the case that uh Satoshi has been identified.

[00:00:24]>> Are you talking about the New York Times piece or the >> No, no, no. It's not It's not [music] Adam. Stop coming out.

[00:00:37][music] >> Hi there from Consensus. We're here with another special interview today. I'm sitting down with Joseph Luben. Of course, you'll know him as the Ethereum co-founder. Uh he's the CEO of Consensus and he's also the chairman of Sharp Link Gaming. Joe, it's always good to catch up with you. Um let's let's get into the meat of things. Uh consensus IPO. What what can you tell me? What can we expect? When when do you anticipate this kind of going through in 2026?

[00:01:07]>> I can tell you nothing so that you have no expectations. Uh and uh uh and uh you know going public seems like a good idea for organizations in our space. Um I I wish that on lots of them and us.

[00:01:23]>> Fair enough. I know that you you can't say too much. you did your job processes. So, >> almost had me there. Yeah.

[00:01:30]>> Let's let's talk about Ethereum and and where it sits right now. Um I think we can go in depth about, you know, uh the Ethereum treasury companies and all of that, but um maybe just take a step back from a from a higher level perspective.

[00:01:41]We spent some time at ECC and CAN. Um it's been an interesting year or two for Ethereum, the ecosystem in general.

[00:01:49]What's your general take right now in terms of the road map and uh the overall vision and the execution from your perspective?

[00:01:57]>> Every year uh in the Ethereum time timeline is interesting um and they're amazing innovations every year. Some years uh uh we suffer from the innovation of the previous year but uh uh it's constant innovation. Um and uh um innovations tend to tend to drive irrational exuberance and blowoff tops.

[00:02:18]You got copycat projects and exploited with projects. So sort of exploiting the original innovative idea. Um and DATs are are a pretty profound innovation um that also went through that cycle. Uh so took us a little longer because Michael Sailor started it. Um and he's done a brilliant job with that. Um and so I I think that the DAT construct is a very valuable powerful important construct or primitive for our space and for the traditional finance space. And so I I think uh DATs are going to remain important for a long time. That said, if you do a dumb copycat DAP or frivolous and and not wellconsidered DAT on a um pretty weak token or or an ecosystem that doesn't likely have a lot of durability, uh if you're doing it to uh to get some liquidity for for your locked up tokens or or other reasons that are not sound and long-term valuable, then then you're just harming your EOS. system. Um, in the case of uh MSTR, in the case of uh Sharplank, in the case of BMNR, who've done a great job, um, I think we're all long-term permanent capital, uh, for our ecosystems, and we will do things that are long-term, incredibly invaluable, uh, staking in, investing in, um, earning, um, very reliable yield, uh, for our shareholders and growing the token price and you know we are correlated to the Ether price and so we'll be something that looks like a beta on the Ether token uh when it's rising and and you know we're correlated on the downside too so we'll have periods uh of great excitement uh and great value creation uh and you know we're we have no leverage uh so so we're again long-term permanent capital we'll be able to ride anything out and and continue to grow the ecosystem and the value of the Ethereum token.

[00:04:28]>> Yeah, look, from the outside looking in, it's been interesting to see Michael Sailor talk about other Bitcoin treasury companies, and he's actually been very positive about the more the the better, especially when they're well considered well-run businesses. Um, when when it comes to Ethereum, obviously, it's it's Bit Mine and Sharlink that are leading the way and and Tom Lee with Bit Mine is just like >> in my mind, he's been like unplayable with the amount of ETH he's been buying.

[00:04:51]Is is it a competition in in your mind or is what Shoplink's doing versus what Bitmine doing?

[00:04:56]>> We're not directly competitive with them. Uh what they do positively affects us. Uh there there may be a little a little bit of competition uh for uh public shareholders for for raising capital. Um we talk to them uh a decent amount. Um there are things that we believe are important for the Ethereum ecosystem uh in in particular the uh the A kelp layer zero um activities uh that that are still ongoing. Um, so we had a discussion on on how we could uh help that situation out and and uh so we will continue to uh engage with them uh different kinds of messaging that that we can bring. One topic that that Tom and I discussed recently is uh uh maybe we should be talking publicly about the intersection of machine intelligence and decentralized protocols. He's we're both uh following that very closely and both uh um big fans of what uh the intersection is going to look like.

[00:06:02]>> I want to talk about like AI and machine learning uh a little bit later in the interview, but just to to dial into the the kelp uh exploit. Uh you consensus put forward 30,000 ETH. Um I think a lot of big players in the Ethereum ecosystem really came to kind of save the day.

[00:06:19]what's your general read on on what happened and uh did it make you slightly concerned about the state of DeFi that you know we can have these kind of exploits when for the past four or five years it's been pretty much plain sailing.

[00:06:30]>> Yeah. So so not concerned specifically about the state of DeFi. Um DeFi uh needs to evolve and mature and harden um as many technologies in our ecosystem have been doing and will continue to do.

[00:06:45]Um, I think we have uh an amazing opportunity uh and uh and a concurrent threat essentially from from machine intelligence. And so it's not it's not the incredibly brilliant foundational models um that we specifically have to worry about. It's it's just the amount of cognition uh the amount of coordination that uh machine intelligence if if it's able to pay attention uh to a certain situation uh for longer periods of time or do deeper research. Uh and so um in the hands of good actors uh whether it's cleaning up traditional software or or cleaning up uh software that runs on decentralized protocols or the decentralized protocols themselves um it's going to be very impactful. It's going to squeeze most of the bugs out of traditional software and we in the Ethereum ecosystem especially, but across um the broader ecosystem, we're going to make use of the the kind of heavy lifting that machine intelligence can provide to create these formally verifiable pipelines so that we're we're basically uh at the deeprotocol level and some of the higher levels we're able to um basically logically and mathematically prove uh that these systems are um designed properly uh and that the implementations um are uh in exact conformance with with those designs. So, uh it's going to be messy for a little while. Um that could be 6 months, could be 12 months. I I don't really know. But we're moving into maybe what could be considered a golden age in in software technology where where it's just super robust because the machines are helping us build it and the machines are helping us prove it correct >> and break it sometimes as well which needs to happen.

[00:08:34]>> But you know um Jesse James the people who robbed banks the people who robbed stage coaches they they were just consultants. Uh so so they were they were self self-appointed consultants and they they extracted their consulting fees for for showing us the the weaknesses in the the early stages of the financial ecosystem. Uh and and so we we need we are an anti-fragile ecosystem and an anti-fragile technology. And so in a sense we need attacks to show us where we need to harden things. You can go all the way back to the, you know, Devcon 1 uh in Shanghai where we had all these attacks the morning of the first day, uh, where somebody really smart who really knew the protocol well was trying to say, "Hey, you guys got some some work to do here. I'm going to slow down your your blockchain until you fix it."

[00:09:28]>> Fair enough. Um, talking about slowing down or speeding up blockchains. Um, Linear is supposed to move to a type one ZKBM. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on in the the linear ecosystem and maybe just your view on L2s because I know the Ethereum Foundation laid out a new manifesto and it did kind of seem like >> there still is that kind of movement more back to everything working on the L1. What's your general thoughts on that?

[00:09:51]>> Yeah. Um love those two topics. Um they're not they're tangentially related. So, so first Lineia um is differentiating itself um as Vitalik instructed our ecosystem to do. Uh Vitalic said, you know, these layer twos aren't exactly um proper extensions of layer 1 and that's changing and we can talk about synchronous composability after this topic, but that's changing fast. Um instead, Vitalic uh uh essentially suggested something that we've been talking about for a long time is that uh these modular execution extensions of of the Ethereum technology enables you to do different kinds of databases. Omega ETH is a very different kind of very different ecosystems. uh Lineia in particular um has announced um uh along with the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust that we're contributing the Lineia technology uh into the the Linux Foundation and so uh a long time ago consensus contributed our Basu execution client into the Hyperledger Foundation basically the same organization um and that resulted in a huge number of financial traditional finance institutions choosing Ethereum technology and ASU in particular uh as their internal private permission blockchain. So DTCC um uh BNY city token services runs a giant business on on that technology. So there many tens of instantiations of those out there. So Lineia is based around Basu. It's it's zero knowledge proof technology built around our Basu EVM technology. Uh and so it's Basu 2.0.

[00:11:37]uh and it makes it really easy for these institutions uh and we're having these discussions with many institutions a about beefing up BSU higher throughput and adding um access to huge amounts of data that that they need as as they move a lot of their assets onchain but also not just having their own internal private blockchains but also having either a proper layer 1 uh for part of their ecosystem or setting up a corpo chain similar what Tempo's doing, similar to what uh what Robin Hood did with layer 2 with arbitrum. Uh and so um having Lineia uh be specifically 100% Ethereum compatible in terms of bite code. There are no other layer 2 technologies that are that way and also uh essentially making it as enterprise friendly as possible. So it's it's enterprise Ethereum uh that is now um accessible in a very comfortable way to those institutions. Um and I can jump from there into synchronous composability because Lineia is implementing synchronous composability.

[00:12:41]Syn a long time ago we knew we needed to scale uh the Ethereum technology scale layer 1 scale via layer 2s. Um we knew we would introduce liquidity and other kinds of fragmentation. We knew we would break composability. Um but we also knew that hey we're engineers. uh we we can fix any anything we we break especially if we intentionally break it. Um and so synchronous composability means and this is happening now and it's going to come in fairly quickly. We we can set up collaboration sets of layer 2s. Um and we can have an a single execution context across a few layer 2s where a transaction starts on one layer 2 and then it reaches into other layer twos and in the exact same block you've got atomic transactions atomic composability. So this is happening now uh or the technology is now available.

[00:13:38]We haven't really fully made it work. um uh the Ethereum economic zone uh that our NOS's friends uh have been driving, they're helping bring it down into layer 1 as well. So, we're going to have block builders, block proposers, uh able to start something on layer 1, look at the the real time proofs at layer 2, look at the real-time proofs on layer 1, uh and essentially compose quite a bit of um a bit of formerly disperate technology and liquidity pools. we can uh bring all all that together into a a set of transactions uh on a in a single block.

[00:14:16]So it's the so real-time proving plus synchronous composability is the holy grail of our ecosystem.

[00:14:23]>> What's the timeline on that? I mean now >> so we don't need a hard fork. Um so the Ethereum ecosystem or the eco economic zone. Um so they have an architecture uh where you can initiate something uh either on a layer 2 or on layer 1 and they have these proxy contracts that uh essentially represent the state and and what functions that you can call in different situations. So um these things coordinate with their layer 2s and it to the initiating transaction it just looks like a lot of activity is happening on layer 1 even though it does ramify in other situations. Uh so interestingly um there's a bunch of ether burned in that initial transaction but you're also also kicking off transactions on lots of other chains and even if they're not burning ether on those other chains they are burning ether on on layer 1 >> which which helps move towards that goal of you know I guess making ETH deflationary right um I know you don't like to talk about the price of of ETH but >> so um uh we uh We wanted to keep transactions as cheap as possible for a while because we believe that the future was ahead of us and we're going to need to um migrate a huge amount of uh traditional economy activity and web 2 activity onto our rails. And so um it has to be very very inexpensive to do a transaction. But you know there going to be so many transactions orders of magnitude more transactions than than what we see uh on web 2. Uh and so um there there are lots of reasons to stake ether uh in the protocol in DeFi in governing systems and you know burning lots of ether uh in orders of magnitude more transactions is a great thing for the security and the strength of the Ethereum economy.

[00:16:19]>> You made mention of orders of magnitude more transactions. that's probably going to be driven by, you know, um, a AI agent, you know, um, what's your general thesis on on what that looks like for Ethereum in general?

[00:16:32]>> Absolutely. So, um, the next major growth vectors are trady um on DeFi and so DeFi is a few trillion a small number of trillion dollars in assets. um traditional finance is less than a quadrillion um in public securities but you know 6700 trillion or something like that. A lot of those things are making their way u to Mecca essentially to uh to to DeFi. Uh and so it it's going to be um an orders of magnitude gamecher to to have Russell 1000 and you know treasuries and ETFs uh etc being very active uh on our rails and so Ethereum there there will be some other destinations for that but uh uh Ethereum has um what Tradfi really needs uh which is um security um has most of the liquidity. Uh it has um 10 almost 11 years of reliability and maturity of the ecosystem. Uh credible neutrality is actually important to regulators and and trad um censorship resistance at certain layers is actually important at other layers which is why we have layer 2s. uh you you want rule sets to be followed and uh um corporate interests to be followed on on something like stripes chain.

[00:18:03]>> Um my last question to you on on the quantum threat, there's been so much talk in the Bitcoin ecosystem about how they deal with the quantum thread. Do you have any thoughts on quantum when it relates to Bitcoin and then quantum and how Ethereum as an ecosystem has been tackling that?

[00:18:17]>> It'll uh it'll be interesting to see how Bitcoin gets out of this. Uh I think it gets out of this by social consensus which they believe doesn't really exist.

[00:18:29]So bit Bitcoin as most of us Bitcoin maximalists know is finished and perfect. Um except when you have to protect it from some existential threat.

[00:18:40]Uh and so welcome Bitcoiners to to the blockchain ecosystem blockchain and Bitcoin. Uh and so uh it may be the case that uh Satoshi has been identified. Uh I I think that that thesis is one that I've held for a long time. I think it's very strong. Um um you know I forget the name of of the the researcher. Um >> are you talking about the New York Times piece or the >> No, it's not it's not Adam. It's definitely not there. Uh but but Lens Hassimon and Hal um have been in my opinion the leading candidates for for a very long time and I think they got at least part of the story correct. Um and so you're not stealing money potentially from two people. You might be stealing it from their estate. Um >> so that's a complicated thing to do.

[00:19:34]It's a complicated thing to um know um powerfully protect the property rights of Bitcoin uh on that network and then say okay um we you know need to protect the system and so we're going to destroy the property rights of of a certain swath of tokens. I I think it is I think there's a a fairly clean way to do that. you know, say here's the deadline, all the the addresses of a certain type. Uh if you don't switch um move your move your coins by that deadline, that then you're uh s out of luck. Uh and you know, it's necessary and and we want Bitcoin to survive. We want Bitcoin to be very strong because uh Bitcoin represents uh decentralized economic bandwidth and we need a huge amount of that for our ecosystem. So we need that so that we can have decentralized stable coins on Ethereum where we can use Bitcoin as collateral in that context. Uh in terms of Ethereum's response to the quantum threat, um it's actually been in process for a number of years. Um it is getting more organized and accelerating. We've been funding Starware um to do hash function research. So um there's a lot of work to do um but we have a a clear road map. We don't have all the answers right now. Um the beautiful thing about uh Ethereum moving to being quantum safe is that we're not focusing on being quantum safe. We're focusing on improving the protocol um scaling the protocol uh essentially. So it's all part of the the [snorts] road map, the lean road map that uh that was already going to be pursued anyway. And so it's it's a nice side effect that we can shift a few little things and get quantum safe also. And we'll share it with the ecosystem.

[00:21:29]>> That's even better. I mean, and you've got big brains working on it. So, it's good to hear. Um, I was going to ask you about mask and I'm just going to say for the record that I'm not going to because we we we don't want to touch on that topic right now. So, to everyone watching this, you have to wait for for an update on that. Joe, it's been great to catch up with you here in Consensus.

[00:21:48]Um, yeah, we look forward to to seeing you continue to do your thing in the industry and um, I think it's it's been looking very positive from an Ethereum ecosystem point of view. So, >> awesome.

[00:21:57]>> Always good to catch up.

[00:21:58]>> Cheers. Thank you.