Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin says the next crypto market surge is coming, along with mass adoption in just about every aspect of our lives.
As for the current bear market, Lubin told Bloomberg the boom-and-bust is par for the course and typical for the industry.
“This is something we’ve seen so many times in the blockchain ecosystem since 2009 when Bitcoin was invented… We’ve seen six big bubbles, each more epic than the previous one. Each of these bubbles are astonishing when they’re happening. But when you look back they seem like little pimples on a chart, really, because the growth has been exponential.
Each of these bubbles has the advantage of bringing attention into our ecosystem. It brings entrepreneurs. It brings developers. It brings money. It brings the prospect of building fundamental infrastructure and creating more value. What we have noticed is that with each of these bubbles we have a tremendous surge in activity and that’s what we’re seeing now… I think we’re now back to November, December prices, which we thought were incredibly high. And since then we’ve probably seen two orders of magnitude increase in development activity, increase in scalability technology. So it’s actually going quite well.
We feel the exponential increase in activity in our ecosystem. It is overwhelming what’s going on in terms of our different product projects, in terms of new scalability technologies, new teams and projects, developers that our entering our ecosystem, new large companies that have gotten comfortable with our ecosystem.”
According to Lubin, the previous crypto bubble has burst and the next one is ‘absolutely’ coming.
“The thing about the internet, the dot com bubble, is that things were so slow back then that there was sort of one rise, one collapse and then steady growth over time. Things are moving so fast and the development is so quick right now that building on these technologies we can see a quick rise and then we see a correction because there’s a fear and greed cycle. People are rushing in because they see the promise of the technology. But then, we build more fundamental infrastructure, we see a correction and then the potential gets even more impressive.
So I absolutely expect that there is a strong correlation between the rise in price and the growth of fundamental infrastructure in the ecosystem and the growth of development in the ecosystem. We are probably two orders of magnitude bigger as a developer community than we were eight or ten months ago.”
Lubin says the current market cycle is likely to drive a number of coins into extinction.
“It’s not all that will survive. I think the future of the decentralized world wide web is hundreds or thousands of decentralized protocols. Some of them will be like Ethereum, and Ethereum is orders of magnitude bigger than anything else, and it’s growing faster than everything else. So it will be significant going forward… We’ll have trusted transactions, automated agreements, smart software objects on Ethereum and networks like Ethereum. We’ll have decentralized storage, decentralized bandwidth, decentralized heavy compute and many other protocols that are interoperable with one another. And that’s being built out right now.”
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As for the looming challenge of blockchain scalability, Lubin says layer two solutions will dramatically ramp things up in the near future.
“For decades, software developers have been bumping up against scalability problems. We’re always trying to max out the available technology. On the internet, we have achieved tremendous scalability in terms of transactions per second. But then we’ve actually thrown a lot of that away with this new blockchain approach to building a decentralized world wide web. We’ve thrown that away, we’re down to like 20 transactions per second. But that is in a trust infrastructure. It’s an infrastructure that automates trust, it guarantees execution. And that is a much better foundation on which to build the next surge in scalability.
We’re ending phase one of the blockchain epoch, let’s call it. Phase one has all transactions processed by all the nodes of these networks, and you get trust from the radical decentralization. We’re entering phase two, where we add a layer two set of technologies. There’s about 20 different projects ongoing that will add hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of transactions per second to the Ethereum ecosystem. And what happens there is you stand up a blockchain system, it subserves a game or a set of games or an exchange or something like that. You link it into a smart contract with Ethereum. It gets the full trust that it needs from layer one, and you can go ahead and do high transaction throughput in layer two.”
So where exactly does Lubin see adoption happening?
“Massive adoption everywhere. So banking industry, supply chain is huge. There’s one prong, which is sort of corporate and another prong which is building up the decentralized world wide web.
Both are growing tremendously. The startup ecosystem is exploding. We’re building a platform for sustainable, ethical journalism. A platform for an adjacent music industry where artists can connect directly to their fans… This is what it feels like to be living in exponential times.”
