After meeting Joe Lubin at the first ever Ethereum Meetup, Andrew Keys was the first business hire at ConsenSys in 2014. His first endeavor, ConsenSys Enterprise, was amongst the first initiatives to ever connect the dots of blockchain and business. After launching the blockbuster Enterprise Ethereum Alliance that signaled the zeitgeist to massive worldwide interest in Ethereum, Keys has spent the majority of 2017 traveling to all corners of the globe, connecting the dots between blockchain, government, central banks, and enterprise — and he’s done most of it while wearing flip flops.

As he switches gears to focus on a new venture of equally grand scope, ConsenSys Capital, we spoke with Andrew Keys about the state of blockchain in 2018, the role of centralized organizations in the decentralized revolution, and what to tell your friends and family who have recently developed an interest in digital assets.

Andrew Keys speaking at Factory Berlin in December, 2017

What excites you most about blockchain technology right now?

The developer community is exploding. I see it everywhere I go. The sheer amount of people at Devcon this year was amazing. We have reports from a large analyst firm that suggest the Ethereum community has 30 times more developers than the next blockchain community. Just the fact that you’re seeing that type of developer adoption is imperative. If you go back through history, whoever has the developers tends to succeed. It’s different in this instance because it’s an open source protocol that people are building applications upon, and a global community can build together on it collaboratively.

The other thing that I’m really excited about is the plan for protocol scalability that Vitalik laid out. My thesis is that we’re in ’93 of ’96 — of the next generation of the internet — where in 1996, you were able to work in a permissionless setting. Until then, it was all intranets. There are two main considerations to this. One is privacy. In the most recent Ethereum upgrade, Byzantium, zkSNARKs were added, so you can essentially privatize transactions. Now that’s been done, there are four main scalability upgrades: State channels, the transition from proof of work to proof of stake brought about by Casper, sharding, and finally Plasma. That’s the outline of the future of the protocol that will illustrate that we can have Ethereum be the substrate for our social and political operating systems.

How do you see centralized and legacy institutions responding to the blockchain disruption?

The world-at-large is realizing that we are slowly upon the next generation of the world wide web in an essentially decentralized, peer-to-peer architecture. Singapore has led the way for all central banks to understand what a tokenized value of currency is, and from there, the central banks of numerous countries have signaled an interest. They are not necessarily ready to do it on permissionless networks, but they’re able to do this in permissioned networks, where there is a central bank or regulatory body involved. This enables them to enact real time gross settlement, which is a huge development for central banks and multinational corporations alike, and a major legitimizing factor for the technology.

How does working with centralized and legacy establishments balance with the decentralized ethos of blockchain and Ethereum?

I think that there’s an evolution. There’s a long game, a medium-term game, and a short game. It’s important to build the on ramps and educate. If you look in the offices, a lot of the ConsenSys people are coming from the banks. They understand that the writing is on the wall. People will still need financial services, but the days of paying a bank just to be a trusted middleman, I think those days are numbered. But there are multi-attack factors to opening up this technology. One is getting the foot-in-the-door with the regulatory bodies and central banks. But on the other hand, there are ten year old kids who don’t have a bank, who are more used to their cell phones being a bank than a legacy, brick-and-mortar establishment. Ether and Bitcoin are great examples of not needing a central bank at all. As the security improves, we’ll be moving money with our cell phones just like we do emails now. There have to be bridges built!

Andrew Keys and Joe Lubin on day one of ConsenSys’ Brooklyn office, before they even had desks!

What do you think will be the major milestones for Ethereum in Q1 2018?

There have been utterings of Casper appearing on testnet. Hopefully, we should have a testnet of proof of stake in early 2018, which will actually be forming consensus through proof of stake mechanism. The electricity that’s expended to secure the bitcoin and ethereum networks is the same expenditure of a medium sized country. Proof of stake will remove the tremendous waste of energy. If we can get to this virtual mineability, that’s a great reduction of our carbon footprint and an evolution in computer science that will create stronger transactions per second and something of a flywheel.

Interest in digital currency continues to expand rapidly. What advice do you have to people who may be new to the space, perhaps buying their first tokens?

The most important thing is to learn as much as possible. Yes, these are assets, they can be speculated on. They fluctuate in price. Exponentially more important than that is the ecosystem that is being built around it, which I think will dramatically increase the price in the long-term. I think that it’s also important for people to understand that in this new tokenized economy, we’re essentially digitizing any type of asset. That’s Beyonce concert tickets, loyalty points, a stock, a US Dollar, the British Pound, a security, or a software license, which many of these tokens are. I think that this is the first time ever that we are able to tokenize the protocol layer of the internet. I believe that there are 3 or 4 protocols that will really compose the next generation of the world wide web, but when we see this token fever, with all these different tokens, I think it’s very important to understand that not all tokens are created equally, and to do your research, and to understand what you’re buying.

What are the functions of ConsenSys Capital?

ConsenSys Capital is a constellation of three projects. First and foremost is Token Foundry, which is essentially a crypto-economic designer of tokens. We help blockchain companies with strong technologists do the crypto-economic design of their token, audit all of their smart contracts using our ConsenSys Diligence tools, do all of their financial reporting using Balanc3, and help them with marketing their token and business through the launch in a proper jurisdiction, with legal button up and the smart contracts audited.

ConsenSys Ventures, which is driven by Kavita Gupta, is a venture capital fund that has already begun investing in opportunities. The last one is ConsenSys Capital Asset Management, which is creating a bridge for all of the legacy institutions, even the most heavily regulated, risk-averse ones possible, to get involved with digital assets. For example, creating custodial solutions, separately managed accounts, and helping create derivative products, so that all the institutional investors on Earth are able to acquire this risk if they so choose, in a compliant manner.

ConsenSys has grown to over 500 people, mostly in a few short months. From someone who has been there since the beginning, how has the atmosphere changed with the influx of new faces?

The one thing that I’ve gotta say is that there is an overall energy of the ecosystem that is driving everybody. I remember going downstairs at Ethereal SF and it was just screamin’. There’s so much excitement. There’s so much positive energy in the ecosystem and that’s a positive, contributing factor to ConsenSys. I think that the fearless leader in this holocratic organization, Joe Lubin, is so positively intentioned and so ego-free and humble, that anybody who doesn’t act in that same spirit kind of….it’s odd. He’s set a very chill example.

I think there are growing pains as a company, like, how do we get to know everybody in the organization, how do we get in front of the work? There’s business that we’re saying no to because we’re not IBM, we don’t have 100,000 people that we can just put on a project right now. But overall, there’s a very positive atmosphere.