Joe Lubin Talks Trump, Blockchain’s ‘Frankenstein,’ And Willingness To Work With China

ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin Forbes / Timothy ArchibaldPerhaps no one is more involved in turning Ethereum into a new way of doing business than Joe Lubin, an Ethereum cofounder along with Vitalik Buterin and others, and the founder of ConsenSys, a company that largely consists of interconnected startups building every aspect of what they call the Global Computer. In a rare in-depth interview with Forbes Crypto Blockchain Advisor, Lubin waxed poetic about his willingness to work with the Chinese government to teach them the benefits of a public blockchain, shared his thoughts on Facebook’s Libra, chatted about blockchain consortium Hyperledger’s largest project to date, and meticulously laid out his master plan for the next phase of Ethereum, which he and others working on the open-source project have dubbed Ethereum 2.0.

I spend a lot of time on the enterprise side in different nations, speaking to different businesses about business blockchain networks that we are standing up in ways that we can build on the public mainnet, or ways that we can link a business blockchain network into another business blockchain network. Lubin: Ethereum 2.0 will be composed of three major phases: phase zero (the beacon chain), phase one where you hang 1,024 different shards off the beacon chain this will allow transactions to settle in groups instead of on the entire Ethereum blockchain, and phase two where you turn those shards into not just storage but execution environments, just like the smart contract machine systems on Ethereum 1.0.

Timeline of Ethereum