There’s a narrative that’s grown up around Ethereum’s two most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they
There’s a narrative that’s grown up around Ethereum’s two most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they went in different directions almost a decade ago.
It suggests the pair fell out over the blockchain’s future direction, with the idealistic 20-year-old Buterin determined to turn Ethereum into a nonprofit foundation, while Lubin and others wanted to commercialize the technology via a for-profit company.
“That wasn’t really what happened,” the billionaire founder of Ethereum infrastructure and software firm ConsenSys tells Magazine during an in-depth interview in Tel Aviv.
“What happened was people were looking for a way to explain why these two people were bumped out of the project. And that was a convenient way to label it. But that wasn’t the reason they were moved.”
Lubin’s referring to Ethereum’s infamous “Red Wedding” in 2014 when the eight co-founders and the team gathered to incorporate Ethereum as a company.
The meeting descended into bickering and infighting over internal politics that saw a devastated CEO Charles Hoskinson pushed out of the team, along with underperforming co-founder Amir Chetrit.
“I think it’s true that I and several people on the team — like maybe everybody else — believed that you need to draw businesses in, you needed economic, commercial validation in order to build better things, even open-source software,” the 58-year-old says in his slow, measured tones.
“But that wasn’t the root of why I started ConsenSys or why two people were bumped off the project.”
Red Wedding and Crypto Google
As documented in Camilla Russo’s history of Ethereum, The Infinite Machine, the co-founders had gathered in Zug, Switzerland on June 7, 2014, to sign a document transforming Ethereum into a for-profit company. But instead of signing the contract, tensions boiled over Hoskinson’s management style and personality, Chetrit’s contribution to the project, Ethereum’s future direction and other internal political issues.
After much back and forth, the decisions were all left to the gangly 20-year-old math genius who’d created the project in the first place. After some time alone on the terrace, he returned to say Hoskinson and Chetrit were out, and Ethereum would become a nonprofit foundation instead of a company.
“Vitalik wrote an amazing white paper — it was right place, right time, incredible vision — and it attracted lots of people of disparate backgrounds, and we worked together well for chunks of time,” Lubin says by way of context.
“We had differences of opinion, at times, those differences of opinion boiled over famously… infamously. And there was a moment where two people were bumped out of leadership, and up to that point, we were having discussions about whether we were going to be purely nonprofit, or whether we were going to pursue a nonprofit track, put it under a foundation, and then the same group of people who worked so nicely together would build Crypto Google together.
“And it became apparent to all of us that we probably weren’t going to build Crypto Google. But it was also clear to all of us that nobody was even close to being able to build Crypto Google and that we’re just building the foundation and the platform for a long time.”
Lubin was already planning his own for-profit company to build out Ethereum’s application layer when the decision was made, and it spun into life not long afterward.
While other co-founders, such as Gavin Wood (Polkadot), contributed more to the early protocol itself, arguably none of them, apart from Buterin, has since contributed as much as Lubin to what Ethereum is today. While ConsenSys didn’t turn into Crypto Google, its infrastructure and apps are as important to Ethereum now as Google is to the web.
“ConsenSys wasn’t formed to commercialize it. It was formed to continue the vision and the mission of the Ethereum platform,” Lubin explains.
Related: The Vitalik I know — Dmitry Buterin
Who is Joe Lubin?
Born in Toronto in 1964, Lubin studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton in the mid-1980s, where his roommate was another future crypto billionaire, Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was in the same faculty, though Lubin tells Magazine they never met.
Lubin has had a surprisingly diverse career, working in AI, robotics and autonomous music creation for a number of different employers. He founded a hedge fund and was the vice president of private wealth management at Goldman Sachs, but nothing world-changing, according to Novogratz, as quoted in…
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