Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin: Cryptocurrency, blockchain are seeing an ‘astonishing’ rise

Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum and the man behind ConsenSys, a blockchain technology solutions company and an incubator for Ethereum-centric start-ups, has hailed the “astonishing” rise of blockchain and cryptocurrency communities.

In a recent video posted by ConsenSys, Lubin referred to blockchain as the technology that pegged trust over everything else. He branded the technology as the “new trust infrastructure”. Lubin added:

“Instead of relying on intermediaries to provide trust, in different situations, in different industries, content creators or service providers or resource providers can directly access and interact with their consumers.”

Prior to the symbiosis of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, the financial industry looked at blockchain as a medium for “disintermediation”, said Lubin. He added that the financial world was also aware that distributed ledger technology [DLT] would lead to a degree of asset tokenization and creation of digital assets like cryptocurrencies, crypto-equities, crypto-bonds, and asset-backed tokens.

He added that banks were looking at blockchain internally to build shared data repositories. This initial interest enticed them to get into crypto-assets and veer towards dedicating a trading desk for them, as hinted by Goldman Sachs and Barclays.

Content creators, especially in the journalism and music industry, who are in direct contact with their consumers will benefit through the DLT system. Bypassing the intermediaries and direct uploading of content is being implemented by Uju Music platform, which has over 1,000 artists in their creator’s portal and their own unique usage policies for their specific content.

Lubin stated that big record companies that take ’70 percent’ of the entire industry’s value could be replaced with “smart contracts on the Ethereum platform”. The protocol will allow intermediaries like promoters, curators, and writers to participate in the process. However, they cannot rise to a level of authority and deplete value from the content creators.

Another industry that could be propelled with blockchain is journalism. The Ethereum co-founder stated that the current news system is clickbaity and riddled with intermediaries that are dissolving factual content. He stated:

“It’s not about telling the truth, it’s not about subtle narrative. It’s unethical.”

ConsenSys invested $5 million in a decentralized newsmaking platform, Civil, to ferment a direct relationship between journalists and readers. This decentralization in the journalism industry would allow ethics and facts to be brought to the fore, and media houses that operate outside these norms can be booted from the platform.

Blockchain is at the core of the cryptocurrency industry, but Lubin sees it as the catalyst to bettering several industries, not just finance and technology. More importantly, the Ethereum co-founder looks at the financial world’s recent embrace of blockchain as a stepping stone to the decentralized currency realm.