The CEO of blockchain technology company Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum spoke to Presence at the Token2049 crypto conference in Singapore. He discussed decentralization, the changing regulatory environment and what he believes will be the increasingly important relationship between blockchain and artificial intelligence.
As one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, Joe Lubin’s influence can be found across much of the crypto industry.
Some of the Canadian entrepreneur’s critics argue that his footprint may be too large, pointing to his reported influence in policy circles and relationships with traditional financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., particularly for someone who has long advocated the decentralization principles underlying blockchain development.
Regardless of those criticisms, Lubin has played a foundational role in the development of the crypto industry, leading or financing some of its best-known on-chain products. He believes developers are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence into those products, while blockchain itself is becoming more relevant to AI as the sector continues to develop.
The Princeton computing and electrical science graduate began his professional career in the university’s robotics laboratory in the 1980s. He later entered financial technology, becoming vice president of technology at investment banking giant Goldman Sachs, before taking an unusual detour to Jamaica and pursuing a second career as a dancehall music producer.
Returning to fintech in the 2010s, Lubin was there at the beginning alongside programmer Vitalik Buterin, computer scientist Gavin Wood and others in establishing the Switzerland-based nonprofit Ethereum Foundation. He reportedly supplied a significant portion of the early funding for the Ethereum network, now the world’s second-largest blockchain after Bitcoin, before disagreements among its founders eventually sent them in different directions.
At roughly the same time, Lubin was building the foundations of what would become Consensys, a New York-based blockchain technology company focused on applications and infrastructure built around Ethereum. Lubin remains CEO and one of the central figures behind the company.
Years later, the crypto industry has moved far beyond the market conditions that followed the Terra collapse and the crypto winter that came after it. In 2026, Lubin spoke to Presence at Token2049 in Singapore about Consensys, decentralization, regulation and the AI-backed evolution of crypto as the industry enters another stage of development. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Adrian: You’ve seen your fair share of crypto market cycles. What’s different about the current one?
Joe Lubin: This market cycle is partly the result of wave after wave of innovation that created greater and greater excitement in our space. We’ve seen periods of irrational exuberance similar to the dotcom boom and bust. At that time, the entire technology and web sector built toward this blow-off-the-top crescendo. It coincided with enormous changes in the global financial system. There are similarities to what we’ve experienced in our own space.
We’re not at an end-of-life moment for monetary systems yet. But we’re moving closer to a period of significant change. Geopolitically, financially and economically, there are massive challenges around the world. Interest rates, inflation and broader macroeconomic pressures have made capital markets difficult to navigate. Crypto reached a point where years of building collided with a much larger transformation taking place across the global economy.
Which is great news in my opinion. The gradual weakening of the previous system, based heavily on top-down command and control through centralized institutions, makes it clear that we need a new trust foundation. We need another approach to building better, more secure and more resilient systems that benefit more people. Ultimately, that can provide greater economic and political agency to individuals and smaller organizations.
Adrian: How does the regulatory environment in 2026, particularly in the traditional crypto powerhouse of the U.S., affect those systemic changes?
Lubin: The regulatory scrutiny we’ve experienced is a natural reaction to a major economic and technological transition. There are generational cycles where different age groups interact with one another and repeat certain patterns. Then there are monetary and debt supercycles. The people who operate the existing systems naturally have vested interests in maintaining them. And in many cases rightly so, because enormous numbers of people depend on those systems.
It’s really difficult to wrap your head around a fundamentally new technology. Decentralization represents a paradigm shift toward a world where trust can be built from the bottom up using globally shared infrastructure. That’s very different from the traditional top-down model where authorities establish trust and distribute it through layers of intermediaries around the world.
The regulatory reaction to that has played out differently across different jurisdictions. In the United States, the relationship between government and the crypto industry has changed considerably over the years. The executive, legislative and judicial branches have each approached the technology differently, and the industry has gradually moved toward greater regulatory clarity. There has been progress, even if disagreements around the appropriate framework remain.
When the internet and the web first became prominent, the U.S. experienced similar struggles. But there are clear-thinking people working to protect things like free speech, free market access and the proper functioning of markets. Different forces continue to operate within the U.S. system. While it would be an exaggeration to say every issue has been resolved, the direction is increasingly toward clearer rules and broader understanding. That should help make what we do easier to understand and ultimately more widely accepted.
Adrian: Do you see progress happening faster in places outside the U.S.?
Lubin: There are other parts of the world, Europe and Asia in particular, where there has been significant interest in supporting and benefiting from decentralized protocol technology and different kinds of decentralized assets. Part of that comes from seeing these technologies as a way to level the playing field with the U.S. This technology is extremely powerful. It’s going to change many things. That means nation states and major companies that establish strong positions in the space could experience very rapid growth.
If you look at the U.K., France, various Asian countries and the Middle East, there’s an enormous amount of activity. Conversations with regulators differ significantly from one jurisdiction to another. Many are eager to understand the technology and determine how existing frameworks should evolve around it. Every revolutionary technology eventually requires a new set of societal rules under which it can operate. At Consensys, we pay close attention to regulatory developments across these different regions.
Adrian: In order to achieve those capabilities, how important is it for the blockchain industry to incorporate artificial intelligence and the analytical advances offered by that technology?
Lubin: It’s very important to bring AI into the blockchain space. It may be even more important to bring decentralized protocols into the AI space. At Consensys, we have developers, we have end users and we’re working to bring those groups closer together. We see a future where end users increasingly become builders themselves through low-code and no-code tools. They’ll be able to create decentralized organizations, applications and digital assets without needing the same level of technical knowledge developers historically required.
We think of these users as a broad spectrum of builders. If you have a broad spectrum of builders with economic and political agency, you probably want each of them to be capable of learning very quickly. For that they’ll need tutors and mentors. AI represents that possibility in some really interesting ways. We need to level up humanity in a significant way, and our AI allies are going to become increasingly capable of helping us do that.
Blockchain is going to be essential to the continued development and evolution of AI, which still broadly consists of two major camps. One is private and extremely well resourced, with some of the best talent, research and engineering in the world, enormous amounts of compute, data, bandwidth and storage. That camp has already built remarkable things and will continue building them. Then there is the open-source ecosystem, which is developing incredibly quickly. Open source is extremely difficult to stop once momentum develops. Eventually, it could become as powerful as, or even more powerful than, the centralized camp.
Adrian: Where specifically can decentralized technologies fit into the evolving role of AI in society?
Lubin: The failure mode for humanity is a situation where the centralized camp becomes so powerful that a very small group of humans controls one of the most powerful technologies ever created for concentrating control. We need to protect against that possibility. Whether from a regulatory perspective or through other societal mechanisms, we need to ensure that the best systems are built by many different people, using many different technologies for many different purposes. Much of that development needs to happen openly.
Decentralized protocols can become part of that because you can have decentralized compute, decentralized sourcing of data and decentralized data preparation. You can have decentralized training and decentralized inference for running networks and processing queries. Much of that technology already exists. The challenge is increasingly about combining AI approaches with decentralized protocols.
I think the first billion users of decentralized protocol technology and cryptocurrencies are going to be human. But I’m not sure who gets to two billion first, humans or intelligent and not-so-intelligent machines and devices. Either way, AI is going to be tremendous for our ecosystem for many reasons. Most importantly, it’s going to represent an enormous amount of economic and computational activity.
Adrian: You’ve touched on some of AI’s more dystopian outcomes. How do advocates of AI or blockchain generate broader public trust in these technologies?
Lubin: Any technology can produce harm. Humanity has navigated many difficult military, scientific and technological evolutions. I’m very convinced that we’ll navigate this one too. Of course there will be challenges. I’m not an AI doomer at all. I think this technology is remarkable and I’m a big fan of AI. I actually spent years, a long time ago, working in this space. I’m incredibly excited about what I see as the necessary complementarity between decentralized protocols and artificial intelligence.
On the trust front, there’s also a lack of trust in centralized finance. At the same time, there remains a lack of understanding about decentralized protocols and many of the positive aspects of Web3, the broader evolution of the internet around blockchain infrastructure, digital ownership and decentralized applications. That’s largely an educational issue rather than simply a case of people saying, “I understand that technology and I don’t trust it.”
Some really smart people are saying similar things about AI. But people who genuinely understand decentralized protocol technology and cryptocurrencies tend to be excited about them. Once you understand how the technology works and you’re not protecting an existing agenda, it becomes much easier to recognize its potential.
Adrian: How do these technologies avoid becoming the preserve of the privileged few who understand them?
Lubin: By expanding the number of people who understand them. Think about the early Web. You’ve probably seen famous clips from talk shows in 1996 or 1997 where people were saying ridiculous things about this strange new technology called the internet. It’s largely a question of education. It’s also a question of younger generations who are crypto-native becoming older, entering more influential positions in society and building companies and institutions themselves. Eventually, this will simply be the way the world works for them.
Adrian: Finally, after several years of dramatic market cycles, scandals, institutional adoption and renewed investment in Web3, how does the industry maintain momentum through 2026 and into 2027?
Lubin: The situation has similarities to the period following the dotcom boom and bust. We had enormous excitement and many amazing evolutionary breakthroughs. Then something big happened. It was technological, it was financial, and it changed the environment. For the following decade, all those people got busy. They took failed approaches and improved them. They took their expertise and formed new companies or joined other companies. Those people built e-commerce. They built the modern web and transformed how the planet operates.
I think the Web3 industry has something similar ahead of it over the next few years. Things move extremely quickly in our ecosystem and there will be many astonishing new waves of innovation. The difference in 2026 is that some of the infrastructure the industry spent years anticipating is already here. Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products, institutional participation and clearer regulatory frameworks have moved crypto further into the traditional financial system.
Even then, I don’t think growth necessarily needs to resemble the irrational exuberance of previous cycles. There is already a large wave of institutions participating in the space, and many more want to provide their customers with exposure to crypto assets and blockchain-based financial products. The process can unfold in a more orderly fashion than it did in earlier cycles. But I still think there will be tremendous growth. That growth may be a slower exponential, but it will still be exponential.