Joe Lubin at Davos: “We’re Starting to See an Explosion of Blockchain Technology”
Highlights from a talk in the ConsenSys Lounge at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
As the world’s economic and political leaders descended upon Davos, Switzerland last week at the World Economic Forum’s annual meet-up, the potential of blockchain tech was a subject of fervent interest, and ConsenSys members made their presence felt in grand panels and intimate talks alike.
A highlight of the calendar at ConsenSys’ Ethereal Lounge was a talk by founder Joe Lubin, who explained how ConsenSys sees itself in the global blockchain ecosystem, what projects are a focus for 2018, and how new perspectives on organizational management are an important aspect of the decentralization phenomenon.
Here are some excerpts from the talk, with the full video below…
On Ethereum:
“The Ethereum project, Vitalik Buterin, had the vision to propose a scalable way to build the promise of decentralization, the promise of blockchain — Scalable in a human sense. Instead of needing protocol priests to build new applications one at a time at the client layer of a blockchain system, Vitalik’s vision enabled millions of software developers around the world to identify their own problems and build their own solutions. We are starting to see an explosion of that technology.”
On ConsenSys:
“ConsenSys was formed three years ago to explore what it means to build decentralized applications, what it might mean to wrap companies around decentralized applications. We came to the conclusion early that it made sense, and we started to build out many different projects: Developer tools, dev ops infrastructure and processes, a huge amount of the activity on the Ethereum blockchain [is driven by ConsenSys projects]. We are building core components like self-sovereign identity, and about 30 other projects that are testing the hypothesis that the nature of business is changing. Where currently business offer services to consumers in a somewhat adversarial context, web3.0 turns everything upside down, changes the nature of identity, enables protocol-based open platforms where you can create n-sided markets that emerge with a set of services where business used to operate.”
“We also do enterprise and government consulting around the world. We’ve got a very exciting educational arm. We graduated 120 engineers and we’re issuing continuing education credits. We’ve got some exciting capital market activities, comprehensive token launch services, custody for tokens, a venture arm, and around the world in our 28 different countries and many regional offices, we are experiencing tremendous incoming interest. For 2018, ConsenSys will continue to grow all of our product projects, and all of our regional offices are desperate to grow — and people are desperate for them to grow so we can handle the incoming interest.”
On Organizational Management:
“We’re starting to believe that the shape of ConsenSys is an organism. There’s a thinker named Ken Wilber. He’s a philosopher who has explored how humans come together in collective action to accomplish goals. He’s identified different ways that we organize ourselves, and has clipped colors to all of these things. Some of the more primitive ways in which to organize are as a wolf pack, as an army, as a machine, as a family. The ultimate organization is an organism, so we’re starting to see ConsenSys as an organism*.
We’re seeing ourselves as this being, we’re seeing all of the people as cells or neurons, we’re seeing those people organize themselves into organs that are product units or service units, like marketing, HR, legal, regional offices, policy groups. At the cellular level, we’re working to make all of our people the best that they can be: emotional intelligence training, non-violent communication. We’re putting together programs that will turn us all into spectacular actors, spectacular selves, and enable everyone to have good communication protocols at the interpersonal level and the organ level.”
The Organism in Practice:
“We’re wrapping those functional units in APIs and we are attaching service-level agreements to those APIs, so that everybody can know what they can expect and when they can expect it and how things are done from all those different functional units. We’re using a system called OpenLaw, which enables hybrid blockchain-based legally enforceable agreements to implement service level agreements.. Instead of having static agreements that are filed away in folders by which we organize our relationships, we will have living agreements that can accept data, that can pay out value when certain conditions are met. This is the spine and the nervous system of this organism.
I anticipate that many of our projects will do incredible things, but perhaps the most profound thing that we do is build this organism, and offer that sort of structure to the world as an example of how you can build a new way of operating in the decentralized future.”
Check out a video of the whole talk here:
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Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
