Will stablecoins end the US debt Crisis?

**Friederike Ernst** (0:00)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Joe Lubin, who is the co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys.

**Joe Lubin** (0:12)
There's been a tremendous surge in our ecosystem and a lot more respect for permissionless innovation. Banks are panicking. Organizations related to banks are trying to figure out what a world looks like, where you can essentially have a full service bank owned by you in your pocket on your phone.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:36)
If I were a bank, I would adopt Blockchain just for efficiency gains, right? So any bank would and should.

**Joe Lubin** (0:42)
So what we're going to be doing is furthering decentralization, decentralized proving, decentralized sequencing and figuring out ways to share some value creation, some of the revenue with token holders. And I think we can build a token economy or sub-economy with a lot of Linea networks that are independent, quasi-independent or closely related to one another that are collaborating with one another that are sharing infrastructure. That's the vision currently for Linea.

**Friederike Ernst** (1:19)
Hey, Joe, thank you so much for coming back on again.

**Joe Lubin** (1:22)
Dr. Ernst, thank you for having me. One of my favorite podcasts and you are my favorite podcast interviewer.

**Friederike Ernst** (1:33)
You're making me blush.

**Joe Lubin** (1:34)
You're the best.

**Friederike Ernst** (1:38)
Good. Maybe let's start with kind of some bird's eye questions. So if you, I mean, you've been in crypto in an extraordinary long time. Web3 values have shifted, right? Kind of you came into Web3 after the 2008 financial crisis. I remember you telling me how you drove across Argentina to see whether you could buy up land in anticipation of kind of this...

**Joe Lubin** (2:10)
Peru and Ecuador, but yes.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:12)
Oh, sorry. Kind of in anticipation of kind of this imminent collapse of the global financial system. And now all the banks are on chain, right? So kind of Web3 was supposed to be this ownership revolution. And kind of what we're getting to some extent is this backend upgrade for Wall Street. And I mean, kind of like I can see it from the perspective of the legacy players, right? Kind of if I were a bank, I would adopt Blockchain just for efficiency gains, right? So any bank would and should.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:46)
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**Friederike Ernst** (3:38)
The deeper question that kind of plagues me is, are we at risk of losing the paradigm shift kind of that was meant to be inherent to kind of Web3 if the user experience rails and distribution end up owned by the same old incumbents?

**Joe Lubin** (3:55)
Yeah, I think if there's any risk and there's a huge amount of risk in the world right now, it's the risk of the paradigm shift accelerating. I started in the blockchain space when it was called Bitcoin in early 2011 and it was crypto-anarchic.
It was a bunch of people who were technologists and they drew in people who were very paranoid and very protective of their own assets. And I think that ethos has significantly prevailed in the Bitcoin space. There were other projects starting in 2011, 2012, etc. Collared Coins, Mastercoin, Counterparty, a whole lot of them. Next was an interesting one that essentially added functions to the protocol rather than pursuing Vitalik's idea, which was to add a computationally complete computer to every node of a decentralized network. And so that was all about builders recognizing that this profound invention of Satoshi, decentralized trust was something that should be everywhere and used in as many cases as possible, not just in the narrow use case of money or store of value, some aspects of money. And so there were certainly a bunch of crypto anarchist types early in the Ethereum ecosystem. But I think a lot of the early builders were really pragmatic. And many of us felt that this is great. We can transform the world to greater and greater, and call it progressive decentralization.