‘We have to pioneer what it is to be a company in this new space,’ says ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin

Joe Lubin, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, bashed at the keys of his Apple laptop, barely lifting his gaze and offering a hurried handshake as I arrived. Sitting in a windowless room on Stanford University’s campus, the billionaire co-founder of ethereum, the world’s second-most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin, finally hit “send” and then snapped his computer closed.

“I have a very important meeting at noon, so we have 35 minutes,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”

Lubin, a Canadian software engineer, former hedge fund manager and reggae music producer, spends most of his days like this: firing off messages, doing conference calls, giving speeches and flitting off to his next destination to spread the gospel of ethereum, a technology he