Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys, recently gave a keynote speech at SXSW. Most of the discussion was focused on developments in the Ethereum ecosystem and improvements to the Ethereum blockchain. However, Lubin also discussed the potential value of blockchain and what the growth timeframe could look like.

Blockchain to Capture Half of the World’s Wealth

When asked about the potential value of blockchain projects and cryptocurrency, Lubin replied, “currently the economy is about $80 trillion dollars. When blockchain fully ramifies in ten or twenty years, the economy will probably be ten times larger and blockchain will probably be a majority part of that.” A very bullish statement from one of the key players in the crypto community.

Lubin also reflected on previous boom and bust cycles. “Every one of these brings a lot of attention to our ecosystem and it brings technologists and entrepreneurs and those technologists and entrepreneurs are currently building. So there is way more activity in our ecosystem right now than there was a year ago or eighteen months ago.”

Layer 2 Scaling

Few people know Ethereum better than Joseph Lubin and his comments on the future of the Ethereum blockchain are very bullish. “This base layer, upon which we will continue to build layer 2 scalability solutions, is going to expand by at least a thousand fold, eighteen to twenty-four months from now.”

Although scaling to that size will mark a tremendous milestone for Ethereum, Joseph believes that the real scaling solutions will happen off-chain. “In layer 2, in the next eighteen months, we’ll probably have millions of decentralized transactions per second. In lots of different networks and state channels and off-chain ZK-Snarks and that’s going to be really valuable.”

The ICO Craze of 2017

Commenting on the number of ICOs launched on the Ethereum blockchain, Lubin said, “2017 was pretty extreme, out of control even. There were lots of great projects but also lots of bad projects and lots of fraudulent projects.”

Asked why there are so few ICOs compared to a year ago, Lubin said, “the SEC and disappointment have just stopped the bad projects from happening.”

Crypto Adoption

Joseph believes we are still in the early days of blockchain. He compared people involved in the crypto community now to early adopters of email. “There aren’t a lot of normal people using these systems right now but there weren’t a lot of normal people firing email around in 1983.”

We may be early but progress is happening quickly and if Lubin’s predictions are correct, in the next ten to twenty years crypto holders will be richly rewarded. Beyond the prices though, blockchain technology has the potential to change the world in a very positive way. That’s the future Joseph Lubin is aiming for and it’s a goal that everyone in crypto can get behind.



