Joseph Lubin: People Said Ethereum Could Not Be Done, but It Is a Remarkable Success

He co-founded Ethereum, a decentralized platform for applications and later founded ConsenSys, a Brooklyn-based blockchain software development company.

Besides managing dozens of projects at the same time, Joseph seems to be now living on a plane, as he has tight schedule visiting events all over the world and spreading the word about crypto to different audiences.

The story behind Ethereum "Bitcoin happened, and in around 2012 things were gaining momentum. People around the world in the Bitcoin space started thinking:"This is an amazing database technology breakthrough, not only does it enable people to be incentivized to share their resources, to validate transactions in a secure network, but it provides these trust layers that we've never had before - so radically decentralized trust layers, so that people could interact with one another, transact with one another.

Lots of people in 2012 thought "We should be using these for all of our software systems," so different things were tried - colored coins, meta-protocols, other blockchain systems.

In December 2013, Joseph met Vitalik Buterin in Toronto, hometown for both of them, a month after Vitalik had written the white paper describing Ethereum.

A few weeks later, Vitalik delivered the Ethereum paper at the North American Bitcoin conference in Miami, and the first phase of the project was structured there as well.

Most challenging time for the Ethereum network "There are lots of challenging times for a project."

It was unprecedented, many people said that it [Ethereum] could not be done; many people said that it was stupid to do it, because the attack service would be so big and fuzzy.

"And it is still very immature, still very young. We are just moving Ethereum into phase two, where we keep that not very scalable, radically decentralized trust layer, and we add a layer two for scaling on the top of that. And we can have twenty transactions per second in this trust layer with hundreds of thousands of transactions per second state channels or sidechains at layer two. And that's available now. If there have been difficult times for the Ethereum project, let's say technically difficult times, it is absolutely necessary - the internet protocols involved, the web protocols evolved, because software developers were pushing on them."

SEC decision on Ethereum On June 14, the SEC official said that Ethereum would not be regulated as a security, stating that the token is now "Sufficiently decentralized to disqualify it from a securities classification."