Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
The world is broken. Trust in nearly all institutions is lost. The complex systems we rely on for our survival are daunting and unwieldy. We are in the dying stages of an 80-year monetary regime and debt supercycle. The conclusion is clear: the current system is unsustainable. The answer is decentralization.
That’s Joseph Lubin, Co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys. While most people are watching the daily candles of Bitcoin and Ether, Joe is watching the “Fourth Turning1” of human civilisation.
About Joseph: As a co-founder of Ethereum, Lubin has been at the epicentre of the most significant shift in software history. Beyond Ethereum, he is the founder and CEO of Consensys, the infrastructure giant behind MetaMask and Linea, which is currently eyeing a landmark IPO in mid-2026. He also serves as the Chairman of SharpLink , a Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) company that holding $1.8B in Ethereum. He’s lived through every crypto cycle, built technology used by nation states and Fortune 500s, and has a macro worldview that extends far beyond price charts.
In short: When Lubin talks about civilization-scale infrastructure and 80-year super cycles, he’s not being hyperbolic. He’s describing the world he’s actively building for.
Ethereum is down 53% today in 6 months. Bitcoin’s down 42%. The DAT model is under pressure. And yet, Lubin remains one of the most convinced builders in crypto, not because he’s ignoring reality, but because he sees a different endgame than most.
Ideally we avoid a kinetic World War III. But we have a chance of getting through this mess via the use of decentralized protocols, via the invention of decentralized trust.
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🎧 Jump to the best parts
(02:09) → The 80-year super cycle: Why Ray Dalio and Strauss & Howe explain today’s market chaos and why the “Fourth Turning” is here.
(09:42) → Decentralised trust as the answer: How Ethereum becomes the foundation of the next super cycle alongside AI.
(16:15) → The origin story: How Ethereum went from 100+ volunteers to civilisation-scale infrastructure without VC funding.
(23:26) → Ethereum killers and layer 2s: Why L2s aren’t just “scaling” tools; they are the partitions that allow nation-states and corporations to join the network.
(27:45) → How blockchain becomes the trust foundation of AI
(32:00) → The DAT strategy: Why Lubin joined SharpLink, and what happens when ETH is down 50% from ATH.
(37:42) → The layer 2 debate: Joe’s take on Vitalik Buterin’s recent comments regarding the L2 roadmap and why ZK-EVM is “magic.”
Important Links
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lubin
Consensys: https://consensys.io/
SharpLink: https://www.sharplink.com/josephlubin-1
Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts
My biggest takeaways from this conversation:
1. The next supercycle
Lubin doesn’t open with price predictions. He opens with an 80-year macro framework that reframes every asset allocation decision you’ll make this decade.
“There are a lot of economic philosophers that have framed super cycles, usually 80 to 100 year super cycles. Ray Dalio has studied many cycles economically. Strauss and Howe put together a theory of generations where they have a seculum, 80 to 100 year super cycles consisting of four generations.”
The pattern: Every ~80 years, institutional trust collapses. The last time was World War II. The cycle before that: the Civil War era. Each time, the crisis forced a complete rewiring of economic infrastructure.
We’re in that fourth generation now. And the numbers back it up. Global sovereign debt has hit $97 trillion. The U.S. alone carries $36 trillion. Central banks have no exit strategy besides printing — which is exactly what Lubin predicts they’ll do.
“We’re going to have to print a lot of money so nation states can pay down their debt. That’s going to be positive for certain assets around the world, including cryptos and precious metals.”
But Lubin’s framework goes beyond the standard “money printer go brr” thesis. Social media has weaponized polarization. Institutional credibility is collapsing. Trust — the invisible substrate of every economy — is broken.
“Big tech, social media created weapons of mass manipulation. Those weapons were in use by all sorts of actors including enemies of the United States. The polarization that was introduced into political systems and social media has caused a tearing of the social fabric on the planet.”
The investment implication: If centralized trust is failing, assets that provide decentralized trust become structurally bid. Not because of speculation — because of necessity.
“The problem is as we crack up, there’s gonna be incredible volatility in the dissolution of the old system and the startup or instantiation of the new system.”
Translation for allocators: The volatility you’re seeing isn’t a sign of failure, but the sign of a regime change.
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2. Why Ethereum is winning, and why no competitor can catch it now
I pressed Lubin on Solana. On Canton. On every “Ethereum killer” narrative that’s emerged. His response:
His answer was both humble…
“There was a special period in time when something like Bitcoin could be developed and grow and become successful. There was a special period of time where a project like Ethereum could be formed and grow … while still adhering to the core principles of the technology—rigorous decentralization, credible neutrality, censorship resistance.”
and clear:
“There’s no way that any VC-funded project or even token-funded project currently could come close to rivaling the magnitude of what Ethereum is currently because there’s just so much has been built over the 10 and a half years that Ethereum has been running nonstop.”
The data supports the conviction. Ethereum secures roughly $112 billion in staked value. Over 30% of all ETH — roughly 36 million tokens — is now locked in staking, an all-time high that just crossed in February 2026. The network runs 1.1 million validators. It hosts 68% of all DeFi TVL and 53% of all stablecoins (~$163 billion).
But the real moat, Lubin argues, isn't the tech stack. It's the origin story.
Ethereum started as a movement, not a product. That’s why it’s credibly neutral. That’s why nation states trust it. A VC-backed chain, no matter how fast, can’t replicate that.
“If we had taken some VC money, it would have had a totally different vibe, shape, architecture. It would not be seen to be essentially of, by, and for the people.”
It was conceived as civilisation-scale infrastructure, not a product:
“You can argue that Apple and Google are maybe civilisation-scale technologies right now, but this is more like TCP/IP. This is the biggest part of Web3 and as such it’s a natural evolution of the Internet and the Web 1 and Web 2 protocols.”
And it maintained core principles through every cycle: Rigorous decentralization. Credible neutrality. Censorship resistance. These aren’t just buzzwords; they’re why Ethereum is trusted by nation states, enterprises, and DeFi protocols alike.
The punchline:
“Major institutions are using it currently or kicking the tires on it. It is likely to become the canonical enterprise Ethereum layer two blockchain.”
Translation: Ethereum is becoming the infrastructure layer for everything that matters.
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3. The DAT model is Ethereum’s answer to MicroStrategy. But it’s under real stress.
Lubin's SharpLink holds 863,424 ETH — roughly $1.75 billion at current prices. It's the second-largest corporate ETH holder after BitMine Immersion. All of it is staked. All of it is earning yield.
But the crypto market lost over $1T in market capitalisation in a month. And the entire DAT model is under pressure.
The thesis is compelling: ETH is “productive money” that throws off staking yield (~3.3% APR), unlike Bitcoin which sits static on Strategy’s balance sheet, funded by debt.
“I had a dinner in December 2024 with Michael Saylor… he did some brilliant things with MicroStrategy, now Strategy. It just became clear… that we can do this better because Ethereum is much more broadly utilized. Ethereum is a productive asset in the sense that it throws off risk-free yield in staking.”
The execution:
“We found a microcap company, SharpLink, and we led a round of investment into it. I became chairman and we hired a truly stellar team. Joseph Shalom came over from BlackRock after a short retirement. We essentially raised $3 billion. It is long-term patient capital. All of it’s staked. All of it is earning quite significantly.”
The endgame:
“Similar to how our friends at Bitmine operate, we will continue to accumulate capital and stake it or otherwise invest it in the Ethereum ecosystem. In the long tail, we’ll probably get to 5% as Tom Lee has indicated. At some point, we need to stop raising capital and buying ether. We’ll still keep earning yield on staking and other activities, but we’ll probably end up taking this giant pile of highest powered money and start investing it into protocols that are highly aligned with and valuable for the Ethereum protocol.”
For investors: The DAT model is a conviction vehicle, not a trade. If you believe ETH at $2,000 is mispriced relative to the network’s institutional adoption trajectory, SBET offers leveraged exposure with yield. If you don’t, the DAT structure amplifies downside just as efficiently.
Related reads:
4. L2s aren’t scaling Ethereum. They’re partitioning it for nation-states and enterprises.
Vitalik dropped a bomb: The rollup-centric roadmap no longer makes sense. L2s aren’t scaling Ethereum. The market panicked. Lubin reframed the entire debate.
“I think it made sense in that it drove the creation of technologies, including the zero-knowledge-proof technologies that are now permeating the Ethereum ecosystem. They’re enabling layer one to scale alongside a few layer twos.”
And he explains what Vitalik actually meant:
“Many of these layer twos have developed up to a certain level of maturity and they’ve stopped there for different reasons, whether it’s a technological reason or a business decision. He doesn’t consider those as being ideal scalability mechanisms for layer one, which is correct.”
The L2 landscape today is genuinely fragmented. Ethereum L1 revenue fell drastically in the last years. The Dencun upgrade in March 2024 slashed L2 costs 90% — great for users, painful for L1 revenue. Blob fees dropped to near zero.2
Lubin’s framework is the most useful I’ve heard: Ethereum is a wholesale business. L2s are its customers.
“The layer two construct is going to be incredibly valuable for nation states to have their own partitioning, for sub-regions of nation states, for gaming ecosystems to have their own layer twos and layer threes, for corpo chains, for consortium chains. Layer twos are here to stay.”
His example is telling. Switzerland might set up an L2. Each canton gets an L3. They’re plugged into L1. It’s not fragmentation — it’s metropolitan Ethereum. Think of L1 as the interstate highway system. L2s are state roads. They serve different purposes but settle to the same infrastructure.
And ConsenSys’s Linea? Lubin is positioning it as the canonical enterprise L2:
“Major institutions are using it currently or kicking the tires on it. It is likely to become the canonical enterprise Ethereum layer two blockchain.”
The conclusion:
“It’s a spectacular technology. It’s magic. And it is indeed scaling Ethereum.”
5. AI without blockchain is a weapon of mass manipulation
This is where Lubin goes genuinely long-term. And it might be the most important part of the conversation.
“I think we should all be a bit wary of Big Tech because Big Tech has used AI over the years to effectively exploit its customers in different ways. What I would be concerned about is very powerful AI in the hands of a small group of nefarious human actors.”
His concern is concrete: centralized AI models optimized for engagement have already polarized global discourse. Give those same entities AGI-level capabilities without decentralized checks and you get what Lubin calls “weapons of mass manipulation” at civilization scale.
The solution? Your own AI agent, running on your own infrastructure, protected by decentralized identity.
“I want my own digital twin agent running on my own computer with my own personal operating system. Maybe it’s even part of the MetaMask money operating system that we’re building.”
The endgame:
“It would be really great in my opinion if a lot of people experience the web from the protection, behind the protection or with the protection of their own agent, their own AI agent that can essentially depolarize the incredibly polarized discourse that we’re subjected to on crypto Twitter and other social media so that we can get good clean information and rational interpretations.”
When your AI agent needs to pay another AI agent, it uses ETH. When it needs to prove your identity without revealing it, it uses zero-knowledge proofs on Ethereum. When it needs to settle a transaction instantly, it uses Ethereum L2 rails.
“We are moving into a world where virtually everything will be financialized, where many of the financialized things will be gamified. We’re moving into a world of markets for everything.”
The thesis: AI creates the demand. Blockchain provides the rails. The machine economy — AI agents transacting with each other at scale — becomes the killer use case for programmable money. And Ethereum, as the only credibly neutral, programmable settlement layer with institutional trust, captures that value.
Bottom line
I played paddle with Joseph a couple of months ago. He came on the 51 podcast yesterday. What struck me then still strikes me now: his humbleness. This is a man who co-founded a $300 billion+ ecosystem, and he still talks about it like a builder. It was profound to hear the humble origins of Ethereum — and why we're building this technology in the first place.
The biggest institutions in the world are building on blockchain. BlackRock. JPMorgan. SWIFT. DTCC. Nation states. That’s not a narrative. That’s a fact.
And here’s what this conversation crystallized for me. We’ve spent years drawing a line between “blockchain as neutral infrastructure” and “tokens as a speculative asset layer sitting on top.” That distinction is now breaking down. It will collapse entirely as markets mature.
Everything converges toward infrastructure. Tokens won’t be “speculative” or “asset classes”, they’ll be infrastructure tokens that align economic incentives across networks of participants. This infrastructure will power the markets for everything. Every asset. Every transaction. Every agreement.
Lubin’s edge isn’t price prediction. It’s infrastructure conviction. He isn't trading the volatility. He's building through it. And when you look at who's deploying alongside him – the largest asset managers, banks, and sovereign institutions on earth – the only question is when the market prices it in.
Take care,
Marc
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The Fourth Turning of the economy refers to a roughly 80-100 year cycle—popularized by Strauss and Howe—marked by intense systemic crisis, institutional collapse, and fundamental economic restructuring. Often, this period involves high inflation, political upheaval, and a pivot away from individualistic, debt-driven models toward national mobilization and, potentially, a new, more rigid economic order.
Fusaka upgrade in December 2025 changed the game. Dynamic blob pricing (EIP-7918) increased capacity from 6 to 14+ blobs per block and caused blob base fees to surge 15 million times. The economic relationship between L1 and L2 is being restructured in real time.
