Is Joe Lubin the Michael Saylor of Ethereum? | The $SBET Opportunity

**Ryan Sean Adams** (0:00)
So my question to you, Joe, do you have what it takes? Can you become the Michael Saylor of Ethereum?

**Joe Lubin** (0:07)
Well, I don't think I need to answer that question directly.

**David Hoffman** (0:15)
Bankless Nation, we have Joe Lubin. He is the co-founder of Ethereum. He's the CEO of Consensus. And most recently, he is now the chairman of a publicly traded company. It's called SharpLink, a company designed to purchase Ether, the asset, for strategic treasury purposes. Joe, welcome back to Bankless.

**Joe Lubin** (0:33)
Thanks, guys. Feels like I've been here recently, but the vibe's a little different.

**David Hoffman** (0:38)
Yeah, you know what? Last time you were here, I was just looking at this. It was just over a year ago. It was May. And I think you were in the process of getting sued, getting nasty grams from the SEC, at least Consensus was.

**Joe Lubin** (0:48)
Also suing, if I remember correctly.

**David Hoffman** (0:51)
Yeah, that's right.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (0:53)
I think that part was the part that worked out, actually.

**Joe Lubin** (0:55)
I think we were on the offense, actually.

**David Hoffman** (0:57)
Why didn't we actually start there then?

**Joe Lubin** (0:59)
The ecosystem won that one.

**David Hoffman** (1:00)
Okay, so what happened with that? So last time we talked, Gary Gensler was on his rampage, Consensus was kind of the next thing. They were actually talking about, it seemed like they were intent on making Ether the asset a security as well. That was some of the implication in their wealth notices.

**Joe Lubin** (1:15)
Yeah, there was an inquisition underway, driven by President Elizabeth Warren.
She and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party preferred to have large government and granular control over all human activity. Simultaneously, the bank lobby, some big banks that preferred to keep winning a red game. They made strange but happy bedfellows. So Jamie Dimon and Elizabeth Warren in sync on some actions. And they all felt that this new technology for decentralized protocols, which would enable disintermediation, lots of systems and empowerment to people and communities, was antithetical to their goals. And so, Chair Gensler was essentially deputized to stop disintermediation, to maintain control of all the things. And the way they intended to do that was to go back on what Bill Hinman, Director of Corporation Finance at the previous SEC, had said about Ether, that it's a commodity, not a security. And they went back on several things that the CFTC had been saying for a long time, Ether, commodity, not a security. So they secretly seemed to recategorize Ether as a secret security. And then they proceeded to do all sorts of enforcement actions, an inquisition, which forced many companies, including our own, to pay tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions in sum, to lawyers to produce documents, to defend ourselves for things that they were insinuating that we were doing. When it got to the point that they were subpoenaing and inquisitioning just independent researchers to try to figure out who to pin this reclassification on, then we got active. So we thought we might have to sue the SEC at some point, based on a few years of that sort of activity, and eventually ended up pulling the trigger. So we sued them in the great state of Texas, and we pretty much tried to put them on their heels to answer our question, which is, do you consider a Heathrow a security or a commodity? And they did some fancy work, and so they said, oh, we're bad. And we're not actually investigating, or we're going to stop investigating your ecosystem. We're going to stop harassing researchers. And so by doing, and they sent out a letter, sort of apology letter, because they were forced to make a direct statement. And then the judge in that case felt that that was sufficient, and our case wasn't right enough to be seen in that particular court. And so he said, sorry, I can't look at this in Texas anymore. And so immediately after that, the SEC sued us in Brooklyn.
They got on the E train, I think. They went from one jurisdiction to another jurisdiction, the one which they lost a Coinbase in. So they moved to a different jurisdiction. They sued us, therefore, basically the same thing. And November 5th happened, Chair Gensler resigned. The complexion of government actions towards our industry has profoundly changed. And so that ended up getting settled.

**David Hoffman** (4:56)
Like did the Wells Notice, all that, did it evaporate in a puff of smoke?

**Joe Lubin** (5:00)
So they sued us based on the Wells Notice. And ultimately we basically won. We achieved our agenda in the first action, and the ecosystem won. It was liberated to a certain extent.