Joseph Lubin is the founder and CEO of Consensys, a blockchain software technology company, and co-founder of Ethereum. You may follow him on X @ethereumJoseph.
 

Our globalized society is going through a phase in which legacy systems are in decline or crisis, while at the same time exponential technological advancement bestows remarkable new capabilities at a dizzying pace.

 

Genomes of not just humans but perhaps even extinct species can now be decoded, and tools like CRISPR enable genetic editing and the promise of eradicating disease or perhaps even biological enhancement. And yet such futuristic breakthroughs also come as the richest and most advanced nations that foster these innovations often struggle to deliver basic healthcare services to their citizens.

 

Another example is that artificial intelligence is right now unlocking revolutionary levels of cognitive abundance across the planet. Yet, it is unleashed against a background information space dominated by just a handful of monolithic and extractive players who fuel polarization, misinformation, and arguably even a mental health crisis among younger generations raised on reckless algorithms.

The author during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange | Source: Guliver Image

 

There is ample reason for cynicism, but also for idealism and optimism. The phrase “may you live in interesting times” is frequently (and likely apocryphally) attributed to a Chinese “curse,” but those who have more carefully studied cycles in history—from Ibn Khaldun and Arnold Toynbee to Ray Dalio, William Strauss and Neil Howe, and Peter Turchin—often see turbulent times like these as a harbinger of a coming rebirth or more abundant era. I believe we are on the precipice of such an era, although we may not be quite done with waves of turmoil and collapse.

 

But much better times are coming in the near- to mid-term. Building bridges from the more dystopic human experience many suffer today to one filled with abundant (if not literally limitless) possibility is the challenge of the era. The truss that will bear much of the load is the full-scale deployment of decentralized trust in the form of programmable blockchains like Ethereum.

 

Decentralized protocols invert power structures by defeating major challenges to human endeavor like geography, access, and scale. In the past, our inability to project ourselves across the globe on demand, or to access resources from anywhere, has forced us to place trust in centralized, rent-seeking middlemen offering to act as proxies or to provide resources on demand. Banks plied a lucrative trade in providing these services for centuries. Politicians in representative democracies do the same with influence and power. More recently, a handful of tech companies offer access to centralized social and information networks of historic scale, having constructed an online feudal system for extracting your data and constant attention in return.

 

The sequel to that last example is now playing out before our eyes as Big Tech pivots hard to focus on artificial intelligence. AI can be a liberation technology, but we currently risk repeating the failures of social media and other extractive tech platforms if we allow AI to be used as the most powerful control and exploitation technology in history. Fortunately, decentralized AI may be the best path forward for humanity, as this essay elaborates in the following passages.

 

People, especially Generation Z and those in developing countries, have caught on to the shortcomings of our ossified and overly centralized institutions. A 2023 survey in the United States found only 16 percent of Gen Z trusts Congress, the presidency, or Big Tech, with fewer than 25 percent trusting the Supreme Court or criminal justice system. Meanwhile, a report from January 2025 shows that 86.95 percent of Gen Z are open to using crypto for long-term savings, with 20.59 percent actively considering crypto pensions.

 

A survey that ConsenSys conducted with YouGov in 2024 saw majorities in Nigeria (84 percent), South Africa (66 percent), Vietnam (60 percent), the Philippines (54 percent), and India (50 percent) reporting that they owned a crypto wallet. 

 

This openness among young people comes even as the crypto world weathers nonstop media coverage that sows mostly fear, uncertainty, and doubt (known in the industry as FUD) in the wake of the collapse of FTX and a full-frontal assault from certain governments bent on protecting their centralized institutional power—at least before the significant political shifts seen in 2025. The hunger for an alternative is real and palpable.

 

The Promise of Ethereum

On July 30th, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate ten years since its Mainnet launch and the creation of its genesis block. The network has been battle-tested over its first decade, undergone significant and consistent upgrades—including the 2022 Merge that reduced network climate emissions dramatically—and built out the strongest ecosystem in the blockchain universe. In 2024, Ethereum securely settled over $27 trillion in value. Early adopters from traditional finance—BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Franklin Templeton—have moved billions of dollars in tokenized assets on-chain.

 

The many rumors over the years of crypto’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

 

Instead, Ethereum is preparing to emerge at this inflection point as a fundamentally new kind of public infrastructure: a world computer, underpinned by a universal settlement layer, designed to serve as the connective tissue for a global economy in transition.

 

By anchoring trust in rigorously decentralized cryptographic consensus rather than centralized intermediaries, Ethereum provides the technical infrastructure for a global economy where individuals, communities, and AI systems collaborate on equal footing.

 

What Ethereum and Decentralized Trust Unlocks

Decentralized protocols like Ethereum provide a new trust foundation for the planet. Rather than intermediaries extracting value by controlling access, Ethereum enables anyone, anywhere, to transact, coordinate, and build atop a neutral foundation. This is a major paradigm shift that stands to re-architect anything it touches long enough for network effects to take hold.

Consider a few use cases already in use around the globe:

 

Frictionless Value Exchange: In places like Venezuela and Argentina, where monetary systems struggle under the weight of inflation and capital controls, Ethereum-based stablecoins and DeFi protocols have become lifelines. They allow individuals to bypass failed institutions, access stable currencies, and transact globally with minimal friction. Millions now rely on these rails for daily survival and economic agency.

 

Self-Sovereign Communities: Ethereum empowers communities to define, fund, and govern themselves. Decentralized protocols become forkable public goods, not extractive platforms. Communities can coordinate resources, launch initiatives, and even spin up new economies—all without gatekeepers.

 

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in February of 2022, UkraineDAO (meaning decentralized autonomous organization) was spun up out of a bedroom in London and instantly grew into a global network raising awareness, funds, and even helmets and other gear and then efficiently delivering them, bypassing the typical bureaucratic channels of either governments and NGOs.

 

Reification of Intent Across Networks: Ethereum enables the translation of individual and collective intent into action at scale. Smart accounts, augmented by AI, can abstract away complexity and automate decision-making, empowering users to maximize their digital agency. Whether it’s a DAO distributing aid in real time or an individual automating their financial life, the gap between will and execution narrows dramatically.

 

Hybrid Human-AI Collaboration: As AI systems proliferate, Ethereum offers a programmable incentive layer that can align human and machine agents toward shared goals. Smart contracts can encode complex incentive structures, maximizing productivity, creativity, and value retention. This new kind of collaborative intelligence takes the shape of hybrid networks, where programmable trust governs not just people but autonomous agents acting on our behalf.

 

And AI itself can also be decentralized. In fact, it must be. This is perhaps the only safe path forward through our current technological transformation. The good news is that opting for widespread adoption of decentralized AI will be the bullet train whipping across the bridge to a better future, supported by trusses of decentralized trust, running on Ethereum’s rails.

 

This is just a sampling of uses already in the world or in active development, and obviously not reflective of those that haven’t even been dreamt up yet. The history of technology and blockchain is filled with innovative uses for things like NFTs that were not foreseen or planned.

 

Surprises are inevitable along the way, but we still have a good sense of what our more decentralized future is likely to look like.

 

How the Future Could Take Shape

The transition from our current siloed and fractured systems to a global decentralized trust architecture is already underway. In 2025, we’re witnessing institutional adoption accelerating across finance, governance, and sustainability.

 

Stablecoin dollarization represents the most immediate and transformative implementation of decentralized trust. In emerging markets from Nigeria to Vietnam, where over 60 percent of citizens now hold crypto wallets, stablecoins provide monetary stability without requiring permission from failing central banks. Tether alone already holds $115 billion in U.S. Treasuries, making it a top 20 creditor to the American government.

 

The implications extend far beyond simple dollar access. Institutional DeFi protocols are now generating yields that outperform traditional fixed-income products while maintaining custody control. This is a critical advantage in regions where bank failures have become commonplace. Major financial institutions that once dismissed crypto as speculative are now quietly building positions in these protocols, recognizing that programmable monetary policy offers transparency that the traditional banking sector cannot match.

 

Perhaps most revolutionary is the emergence of collateralization networks that enable microloans to the unbanked. By tokenizing real-world assets and establishing on-chain credit scoring, these protocols can extend financial services to over one billion people previously excluded from the global economy. A farmer in rural India can now collateralize future harvests through tokenized representations, accessing capital at rates previously available only to institutional borrowers.

 

When financial relationships are encoded in transparent, immutable smart contracts rather than opaque agreements with rent-seeking intermediaries, the cost of capital plummets and access expands exponentially.

 

Decentralized AI: Humanity’s Best Hope

The convergence of decentralized trust and artificial intelligence is perhaps the role that blockchain was truly constructed to play in humanity’s future.

 

Big Tech has done amazing things for humanity. Still, they’ve also done catastrophic things for the social fabric of mankind, and it could get much worse. When a small number of companies control the most powerful AI models, they can shape the development of all technologies, including blockchain. This centralization creates single points of failure and vulnerability to both malicious attacks and well-intentioned but harmful policies.

 

Centralized AI in the hands of the same Big Tech companies that created extractive and exploitative Web2 platforms can also become a weapon of mass manipulation. Adding accelerating AI technology to Big Tech’s already dominant arsenal enables them to understand us better than we understand ourselves—and effectively addict us and our children to their technology.

 

What we need is to evolve the relationship of AI and humanity to create a hybrid human-machine intelligence. In many ways, we already see this happening as AI embeds itself deeper in our work and daily routines. The way to achieve this best-case scenario is to marry AI with decentralized protocols like Ethereum and high-transaction-throughput Ethereum Layer 2 systems, offering an opportunity to re-decentralize the web and prevent a small number of centralized powers from wielding excessive control.

 

We can adopt AI systems that enable decentralized training and inference. And digital twin agents can be owned and controlled by people, so they can operate in the best interests of their human. There are systems that can penetrate the black box of AI without compromising it by making use of zero-knowledge proofs to provide guarantees that a model was trained ethically.

 

Two approaches show particular promise. First, ZKML Verification enables auditable AI training data on Ethereum, creating transparency around how models are built and what biases they might contain. This verification creates accountability that centralized AI systems lack.

 

This decentralized approach to AI can ensure that AI models are trained in a way that is ethical and aligned with human values while protecting against manipulation. Today we see social media algorithms tuned to encourage engagement by surfacing emotional and inflammatory posts; it’s easy to imagine widely used AI models trained to induce similar results—or for even more malicious purposes of misinformation or manipulation.

 

Second, Agent Swarms distribute collaborative intelligence across networks of specialized AI entities that communicate on decentralized protocols. These swarms may be governed by DAOs rather than corporations, ensuring alignment with community values rather than shareholder interests.

 

Critically, these systems also incorporate existential safeguards through decentralized governance. Multi-signature councils composed of both human and AI participants can implement kill switches or circuit breakers when necessary, preventing cascading failures while maintaining the system’s fundamental autonomy. This hybrid governance model ensures that AI systems remain aligned with human values while leveraging their superior computational capabilities.

 

By distributing both the technical capabilities and the governance of AI across communities rather than corporations, we can ensure these powerful tools serve the many rather than the few.

 

On a day-to-day level, a world in which AI agents and decentralized protocols are the primary rails for our interactions will supercharge the materialization of our individual intentions. Digital twin wallets now autonomously manage diversified portfolios using real-time market data, executing complex strategies previously available only to sophisticated traders. Soon, your AI ally will understand your financial goals, risk tolerance, and time horizons, continuously optimizing across protocols to maximize returns while maintaining security.

 

Imagine this agentic AI ally as a controller that interfaces with thousands of specialized agents configured in different swarms, each understanding different protocols and market conditions. When you express an intention like “I want to save for retirement while supporting renewable energy projects,” that intention is converted into an intent description language and routed to solver networks that execute the optimal strategy across multiple chains and protocols.

 

Coordinating Complexity for a Sustainable Future

Ethereum has already demonstrated its sustainability leadership through the Merge, reducing the network’s energy consumption by over 99.9 percent. But this was merely the first step in a broader transformation of how we coordinate resources and incentives around sustainability.

 

Tokenized energy markets now enable peer-to-peer trading of renewable energy credits, creating liquid markets for sustainability that operate with minimal friction. Solar panel owners in Arizona can sell excess capacity to buyers in California through automated smart contracts that optimize for grid stability and carbon reduction. These markets reduce emissions and fundamentally realign incentives to reward sustainable behavior in real time.

 

Carbon credit trading has similarly been revolutionized through tokenization. The traditional carbon market, plagued by verification challenges and middlemen, has been replaced by transparent on-chain systems where satellite data automatically validates carbon sequestration and issues corresponding tokens. This eliminates the fraud that undermined previous systems while dramatically expanding participation to small landholders and Indigenous communities who can now be directly compensated for preservation efforts.

 

Network State Governance and Coordination

Perhaps the most profound transformation will occur in governance. The post-World War II order of representative democracy and international institutions is being supplemented (see the aforementioned UkraineDAO) by network states that coordinate around shared values rather than geographic proximity.

 

Sophisticated governance systems are possible, with their own treasuries, decision-making processes, and enforcement mechanisms. Continuous voting via platforms like Snapshot can replace episodic elections, enabling fluid participation that responds to changing conditions rather than arbitrary electoral calendars.

 

Transparent lobbying with on-chain records of policy influence attempts will eliminate the backroom dealing that undermines public trust in traditional governance. When every interaction between special interests and decision-makers is recorded immutably, corruption becomes nearly impossible to conceal.

 

AI-mediated consensus detection represents perhaps the most revolutionary advancement. These systems analyze proposals for logical contradictions before implementation, preventing the regulatory capture that plagued previous governance systems. When a proposed policy would create inconsistencies with existing commitments or produce unintended consequences, these systems flag the issues for human review, dramatically improving policy coherence.

 

AI Digital Twin agents will become necessary to help navigate the complexity of our technology—not to mention our world and the challenges we face. It is also imperative that we own our digital twins, a capability best facilitated through decentralized protocols.

 

On-chain treaties offer reliable enforcement through code rather than the threat of military action. When nation-states or network states enter agreements, they can stake digital assets as performance bonds, with automated sanctions or slashing of diplomatic staking as penalties for non-compliance.

 

Further development of similar decentralized protocols can transform crisis response through programmable trust. When every transaction is visible and verifiable, accountability becomes the default rather than an aspiration. The same transparency that critics cite as a vulnerability becomes the ecosystem’s greatest strength in combating bad actors and inefficiencies in legacy systems.

 

This creates a new kind of international relations based on cryptographic verification rather than trust in institutions that have repeatedly failed to enforce their own mandates.

 

The result isn’t the elimination of traditional governance, but its evolution into a hybrid system where network states and nation states collaborate through shared infrastructure. A citizen might simultaneously participate in their geographic community, several interest-based network states, and global coordination mechanisms—all through interfaces that abstract away complexity while maximizing agency.

 

Some might dismiss this as utopian thinking, but it’s also the natural evolution of our social technology to match the complexity of the challenges we face. Just as joint-stock corporations emerged to coordinate economic activity beyond what individuals could achieve, network states are emerging to coordinate social, environmental, and political activity beyond what traditional governance can manage.

 

Ethereum as Civilization’s Next Settlement Layer

As we stand at this critical inflection point in 2025, the convergence of institutional collapse and technological acceleration demands nothing less than a foundational reboot of our global coordination systems. The post-World War II order that has structured our world for nearly eight decades is visibly fracturing, unable to address the complexity of our interconnected challenges. Yet at the same time, we’re witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in technological capabilities that could either exacerbate our divisions or heal them.

 

What makes Ethereum uniquely positioned to serve as civilization’s next settlement layer is its combination of technical robustness and social resilience. The network has weathered multiple market cycles, regulatory challenges, and technical hurdles, emerging stronger after each test.

 

Blockchain’s inherent transparency enables superior tracking compared to traditional cash systems. Every transaction on Ethereum is permanently recorded on a public ledger, creating an immutable audit trail that law enforcement can follow. According to Chainalysis data, less than 1 percent of all cryptocurrency transactions involve illicit activity, compared to an estimated $2 trillion laundered annually through traditional financial systems.

 

Recent and upcoming Ethereum updates have focused specifically on abstracting away complexity and approaching web2-like usability. The Dencun upgrade in March 2024 dramatically reduced transaction costs, with average gas fees dropping by 95 percent. This single improvement has transformed the economics of Layer 2 networks, enabling microtransactions that were previously impractical. Projects like Linea and the upcoming MegaETH are designed specifically to maintain composability across the ecosystem while delivering the performance needed for mainstream applications.

 

Smart account abstraction, which is part of the most recent Pectra update to Ethereum, represents another breakthrough in usability. These programmable accounts eliminate the need for users to manage private keys or understand gas fees, creating experiences that feel as seamless as traditional applications while preserving the benefits of decentralized ownership.

 

The establishment of Etherealize in early 2025 represents another critical step in this evolution. By bridging Ethereum with traditional finance and institutional players, this organization is accelerating the recognition of Ethereum as the digital economy of tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ethereum remains committed to its core values of decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance. This balance of pragmatic growth and ideological integrity is precisely what’s needed for a system that will underpin trillions in value.

 

Meanwhile, the regulatory dam has finally broken. Stablecoin legislation is advancing in the U.S. Congress, providing clarity for one of the most important applications of blockchain technology. The recognition of the free dollarization of the world as beneficial to America represents a profound shift in regulatory thinking.

 

This regulatory thaw extends beyond the United States. More than 50 nations now recognize ETH as a commodity rather than a security, creating consistent treatment across jurisdictions. This global consensus is enabling institutional adoption at an unprecedented scale, with major financial institutions quietly building positions in DeFi protocols as they recognize the transparency advantages over traditional banking.

 

The Path Forward

As we look toward the remainder of this decade, several developments are already underway that will accelerate Ethereum’s evolution into civilization’s settlement layer:

 

ETH is rapidly becoming a viable reserve asset. With over 50 nations now recognizing ETH as a commodity rather than a security, institutional adoption is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. By 2030, ETH will underpin a global economy where AI allies democratize finance, energy markets heal ecosystems, and network states replace extractive institutions. We are moving from millennia of scarcity and a fear mindset to a world of infinite creativity and value creation.

 

The amount of purchasing power in “magic internet tokens” created in the next decade will dwarf the purchasing power in nation-state currencies. This shift enables us to focus on different kinds of societal measurements beyond GDP—metrics related to healing, mental health, and societal well-being.

 

The path forward requires patience, persistence, and a commitment to the long-term vision of decentralized trust. But with each improvement in usability, each regulatory breakthrough, and each new application that demonstrates the power of these systems, we move closer to a world where trust isn’t imposed from above but emerges organically from transparent, equitable protocols.

 

As I look ahead to Ethereum’s second decade, I’m more convinced than ever that we’re building the infrastructure for a profound transformation in how humanity organizes itself. The challenges are significant, but the potential rewards—a more equitable, sustainable, and abundant world—are worth every effort. That’s a future worth building, and it’s closer than most people realize.

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