Last week in Berlin, more than 800 members of the Ethereum ecosystem gathered at Technische Universität Berlin for the centerpieces of Berlin Blockchain Week: DappCon, hosted by Gnosis, and ETHBerlin, hosted by the Department of Decentralization.

Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum, appeared in a fireside chat and a panel on Thursday, August 22nd and shared his insights on the current state of the ecosystem.

Gnosis CEO Martin Köppelman sat down with Lubin for an AMA (which became a fireside chat due to technical issues with the AMA Sli.do) and discussion on the global role of Ethereum, Libra, defi, tokens, ConsenSys, scalability, measuring decentralization, and much more. Below are a few highlights from their conversation.

An audience highlight was Lubin’s answer to a simple question from Köppelman: “If Ethereum fails, why?” Lubin replied to a round of applause:

“Ethereum won’t fail. It is massively decentralized, it’s useful, it’s growing incredibly quickly, and it is antifragile. Whatever you throw at it will make it stronger.”

They also discussed the Ethereum narrative and how it has changed over time: “The narrative keeps changing. I think it’s a characteristic of many or most people that they prefer static things and to think linearly. It’s much less complicated to live in a world that doesn’t change, but that’s a boring world, and it’s not the world we actually live in.”

Lubin continued,

“It’s great that the Bitcoin narrative is evolving as its ecosystem is evolving, and Ethereum has evolved so much more dramatically. We knew we were building an incredibly complicated machine, but it was really a proof of concept at first. What is a decentralized application? How do we wrap corporations around them? How to decentralize organizations and identity? We are moving in many directions rapidly and building out the decentralized economy. It’s building beautifully.”

Joseph Lubin, DappCon 2019

Lubin also revisited the concept of the global settlement layer, which he’s mentioned in a few talks over the last six months:

“The world has been constructed out of necessity from top-down command and control and hierarchical systems. Decision-making has been slow and expensive. Now we’re much better at instantaneous communication and Bitcoin and Ethereum have enabled large collectives to make big decisions in a short period of time. That changes the organizing principle. Flat, fluid, decentralized systems have lots of advantages over hierarchies. Trust systems that were centralized and subjective now can be automated. It’s not yet a big, high throughput trust system now.

You, [addressing Köppelman] were the first person I ever heard call it a supreme court. Especially as we move into Ethereum 2.0, where we have the beacon chain, we can think of this base trust layer as the final arbiter. I also call it a global settlement layer. We shouldn’t be looking to the supreme court to arbitrate between little disputes — but when we escalate certain situations, it’s going to be a much more equitable judicial and executive system for the planet. It’s there, it’s usable. We need to scale it.”

Asked how he’d suggest measuring decentralization, Lubin said,

“We could begin to measure some metrics: number of nodes, distinct node owners, number of devs, of clients, jurisdictions in which they reside, power grids in which the nodes sit. Governance is a good measure, also. I prefer what Ethereum is doing over what Tezos, Dfinity, Polkadot are doing or are going to do. I think it’s going well for such a young ecosystem. I’d be concerned about codifying governance into the protocol this early. Some projects would take advantage. Some of these protocols will end up with VCs and founders as de facto in control.

I’m impressed, I’ll say, with how governance is going in the Ethereum ecosystem so far. It would be great to have more inexpensive hardware devices. Maybe the maximum possible decentralization is that every person on the planet has their own node running Ethereum 2.0 with some equal amount of ETH staked.”

Martin Köppelman, Stephen D. Palley, Ryan Selkis, Vitalik Buterin, and Joesph Lubin, DappCon 2019.

How To Measure Success Panel ft. Vitalik Buterin

Lubin also spoke on a “How to Measure Success?” panel later in the day, which featured a surprise guest: none other than Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin himself. Hosted by Köppelman and also featuring Stephen D. Palley, Blockchain and Virtual Currency Attorney from Anderson Kill P.C. and Ryan Selkis, Founder & CEO of Messari. This year’s theme of success flipped the theme of last year’s panel on what could go wrong with the Ethereum project.

Köppelman asked the panelists to consider: What is the metric that should change if we are to make Ethereum successful? Below are some highlights from Lubin.

Köppelman opened by asking if Ethereum is already successful:

“Right now most dapps have fewer users than there are people in this room. Are we successful right now?” Lubin’s response compared the emergence of Ethereum to earlier technologies.

“The blockchain ecosystem is ten years old. The smart contract ecosystem is arguably 5 years old. It’s incredibly young as a technology and quite immature. We’ve built what we are considering a base trust layer and are offering it to the world conceptually. We can’t expect all the world’s applications to be on it yet. Technologies take quite a while to develop and to be adopted. Between when Tim Berners-Lee wrote his whitepaper and when there were ramifications in society took at least ten years. The same thing happened with mobile phones. When a technology first emerges, it’s very raw, you see the innards of the machine, you turn the cranks yourself, you deal with long strings of hexadecimals. We’re figuring out scalability, pricing, confidentiality. Right now we have to measure user adoption by how many developers there are in the space. In that sense, we’re doing incredibly well. They will put the shell on the machine and make it really usable. Early on we realized it would go well for a while, but until we hit some extreme friction in society, we won’t really know that we’ve arrived.”

Later, discussing benchmarks for Ethereum’s success, Lubin shared the following: “I definitely believe that having a better trust foundation, having reduced barriers, having better collaboration platforms will lead to more political and economic agency for more people. While all systems, including blockchain systems, start out with the value extremely concentrated amongst the few people that start a company, we are achieving greater decentralization in our ecosystem. And as it starts to actually get used, the value will spread out better than in the previous technological revolution, where the technologies that were brought forth, enabled the people in those organizations to stack value higher than it’s ever been stacked before.

I think this time will be different. Blockchain is a unique mechanism that will enable this. I feel like by today’s metrics, things are going to get better in terms of wealth distribution, but also with different technologies, we can get to the point where our survival needs are met and we will start to change what we value in society.

We can configure our institutions to maximize mental and physical health or societal health rather than GDP, maybe 20 years from now.

I was just in South Korea — there is a huge emphasis on social value. I think the metrics have a chance of changing over time.”