Ethereum Has Already Scaled Quite Significantly: ConsenSys' Joe Lubin

Lubin spoke about the current technical capacity of Ethereum and what awaits the ecosystem in the near future.

There'll be different ways that it gets connected with Ethereum 1.0: ether tokens will move from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0, there may be bidirectional mechanisms, and there may be a way in the not too distant future to use the Beacon Chain, which is basically the Phase 0 proof-of-stake finalized blocks on Ethereum 1.0.A proof-of-stake future.

Proof-of-stake fixes all of that, proof-of-stake trades all that expense for a crypto-economic bond - essentially ether [ETH] - that you put into a smart contract on Ethereum.

As we heard on another panel, representatives from EY and ConsenSys were both arguing for using Ethereum's mainnet, a public blockchain, for large enterprises.

One of John Wolpert's arguments is that Ethereum will be the base trust layer, the base settlement layer that many different sidechains and other technologies will link into.

We've got a group called Aztec that built a protocol that enables obfuscation of transactions on the public Ethereum.

The Aztec protocol is super cool, and it will be live on public Ethereum pretty soon.

Essentially, the public Ethereum isn't fully ready for primetime - for all use cases - because it's not scalable enough yet and because it doesn't have sufficient privacy and confidentiality for all use cases yet.

We're solving privacy and confidentiality by using private networks that can link into the public Ethereum or link into each other.

We're solving scalability via layer two and moving to Ethereum 2.0.