ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin talks about Ethereum at SXSW 2019

On Thursday, March 14, Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys, presented his reflections on a wide range of topics at the SXSW 2019 conference in Austin, Texas.

Joe's comments during an interview with Manoush Zomorodi, co-founder of Stable Genius Productions (which produces the popular ZigZag podcast focused on blockchains).

Here are some highlights of this interview:

• Joe read Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper ("Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic payment system") in early 2011. He "clicked" for him "very early".
• Before founding Consensys, he had "the chance to meet Vitalik Buterin, the guy who" invented "Ethereum" about a month after Vitalik wrote the original Ethereum white paper. Joe then spent about a year helping the Ethereum platform be made public. Shortly before the release date, Joe decided to start ConsensSys because "few people were building at the application layer". The ConsenSys team started by trying to create decentralized applications (DApps) for Ethereum, but since Ethereum did not have any development tools at that time, ConsenSys created some development tools for Ethereum, opening thus a new ecosystem.
• ConsenSys tries to be as decentralized as possible in its organizational structure (trying to move away from hierarchies as much as possible). One of the tools they created (as part of their "Future of Work" project) to fix it is called SOBOL, on which Joe tweeted November 2, 2018:

We introduce a new tool to manage decentralized organizations. Used internally to @ConsenSys Until now, SOBOL was helping individual groups of individuals to self-organize. View an employee map, set roles and goals, browse the activity thread, or play with the API. https://t.co/qSTUFXhCAz pic.twitter.com/CFJ7XVP6Lt

– Joseph Lubin (@ethereumJoseph) November 2, 2018

• The launch of Civil Tokens (CVL) was "the most successful launch of chips in history". It had about "10 times more participation" than other more successful "coin-to-run" tokens that ConsenSys made. About 1.5 million tokens are available. The civil platform for sustainable ethical journalism is "open for business" at the moment.
• ConsenSys plans to make about four to five token launches this year. These will all be utility tokens.
• Joe says that "there is a lot more activity in our ecosystem now than it was a year or 18 months ago."
• "Ethereum can currently process between 14 and 27 transactions per second." He sees Ethereum as "the basic trust layer" (layer 1). Layer 2 is a layer of scalability. He predicts that some Layer 2 solutions for Ethereum will be able to process up to one million transactions per second by the end of 2019.
• Ethereum 2.0 is in 18-24 months.
• The Ethereum pbad to the point of sale means that very little electricity will be used and that no special hardware will be needed to operate a node (a conventional laptop should suffice).
• MakerDAO is an example of a cryptography project that is not supported by ConsenSys and that Joe sees as promising.