Vitalik Buterin gets all the glory for Ethereum’s foundation, but the fact is that he wasn’t alone at the beginning. Joseph Lubin was there with him.
It turns out that Mr. Lubin is a shrewd cryptocurrency analyst who forecasted the unmitigated disaster correctly we would see in the 2018 market, but who also thinks that the future looks very good for digital assets.
The new industrialists of the blockchain
Mr. Lublin is one of the crypto verse’s titans. In 2014 he was partly “guilty” for the birth of Ethereum in 2014. He was there with Mr. Buterin and a handful of other talented and visionary co-founders. So he can claim his fair share of credit in coming up with the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. That’s Ethereum, of course.
When Ethereum first arrived into the market, the token’s price was of USD 1,00. Less than four years later, in January 2018, it was trading at USD 1.420,00. It’s trading at USD 160,00 as we write this article. Granted, it’s not as impressive s 1.4k, but it’s still a fantastic success story.
Mr. Lublin chose to follow his path in 2015, and he became the leader at ConsenSys. It’s a software company that develops applications to deploy on the Ethereum blockchain and network. When the crypto market was at its height, Forbes named Mr. Lublin as the second-richest crypto millionaire (the first one being Chris Larsen, Ripple’s co-founder). He’s worth somewhere between one and five billion dollars.
As Forbes was bringing the world’s attention to him, ConsenSys was becoming a hydra. At 1,200 employees (and growing) it became unmanageable because it lacked a proper corporate organization that could keep things on track.
According to a Forbes report, the company tried to turn decentralization into a management style. As a result, there were few managers and reporting structures. If a project could have Mr.Lubin’s attention and approval, it would get from a quarter to a half a million dollars in funding without much requirements of revenue.
That was all possible because of Mr. Lubin’s fortune, mainly held in ETH tokens. He’s rumored to be the most significant Ethereum coins holder in the world.
The ConsenSys update
ConsenSys growth was unsustainable. Some calculations estimate the company’s excess spending at more than a hundred million dollars. The firm’s organization was a disaster when the 2018 bear market arrived. No corporation could take both hits at the same time. So ConsenSys found itself in a place in which it had to take a step back and reconsider its operations and management.
In December 2018, Mr. Lublin told the world that ConsenSys 2.0 was here. A new ConsenSys that would privilege “greater efficiency, accountability, and attention to revenue.” Every underperforming project or employee got the ax. Also, 13% of the staff got sacked. It was a picnic for the company’s critics who delighted in predicting the company’s downfall and linking it to the catastrophic year 2018 for the cryptocurrency market. The market hit rock-bottom on December 16th (one year minus a day from the market’s historic high) as Bitcoin reached the price of USD 3.237,00.
The future according to Joseph Lubin
The ConsenSys reboot was controversial. Publications, news sources, analysts and social media used ConsenSys trouble as an illustration for failure within the crypto verse. They delighted in contrasting the overall market situation in December 2018, after the “illusion” that was 2017.
On December 21st, 2018, Mr. Lublin stated that the markets had finally arrived at their most paranoid point. In his view, this was the lowest possible ebb. In his own tweeted words,
“I am calling the cryptobottom of 2018. This bottom is marked by an epic amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt from our friends in the 4th and crypto-5th estates.”
He was right for the most part. BTC’s lowest point had arrived six days before his tweet, and it’s been recovering (if exceedingly slowly) since then.
Mr. Lublin also said that ConsenSys was in no danger at all and that its corporate health was in good shape.
He later added,
“We have been on the receiving end of an epic amount of conjecture and preemptive paranoia — filled with damning rhetoric about situations journalists and bloggers don’t have real data for, actual insight into, or understanding of.”
Mr. Lublin also cleared some things out. Rumors were around that the company would get rid of more than half of its workforce suddenly. The firm’s head explained that a restructuration had been going on since April and that the organization was indeed growing in some sectors.
Mr. Lublin’s vision for the blockchain industry is generally optimistic and positive. He thinks that Ethereum will solve its scalability problems thus allowing its token ecosystem to keep growing and maturing.
Again, the Ethereum’s co-founder has been right. From December 2018 on the market has been growing (the total market capitalization has increased by USD 30 billion).
Then April 2nd arrived, and it brought that legendary Asian buying order for Bitcoin. The asset increased 20% in price in sixty minutes flat. Bitcoin’s surge kickstarted the market which has been growing steadily for a full month already (and Bitcoin is expected to test the USD 6.1k sometime during the following week). Even as some terrible news has appeared (like the fact that Tether is, after all, not backed by a dollar per token), the bulls are still in charge of the market and Bitcoin is above USD 5.800,00.
But it’s still too soon to know if we are in the midst of crypto’s new bull run. When will we know if the crypto winter is finally ended? Will that be when Bitcoin’s price reaches USD 6500?
Mr. Lubin’s successful forecasts could be sheer luck or a coincidence. The cryptosphere is so fraught with predictions, forecasts, and prophecies of all kinds that it’s just unavoidable that some of them have to be right. But here we are dealing with the case of a person who’s been one of the driving forces behind the crypto verse’s growth, and that has knowledge, experience, and insight into the industry that only a handful can match.
He knows everybody who is somebody within the cryptosphere, and he has lots of insider information because he is one of the leading insiders. So it’s maybe not all about luck, or coincidence. Perhaps this one of the few “crypto-prophets” who knows and understands what he’s saying.
So we may or may not agree with Mr. Lubin in any particular subject. But the fact remains that his track record is excellent. With so much junk, or hype, or barely trustworthy information going around the cryptocurrency forums and websites all the time, it’s refreshing to find a source whose knowledge and reliability stand the test of time — and fact-checking.
No, we won’t encourage you to believe or to agree in everything with Mr. Lubin. We think that being aware of his views could be very useful sooner rather than later. But of course, everybody must make their own decisions based on their own thorough research. The bottom line is that anybody who wants to create a crypto success story of their own, can only profit from paying attention to one of the persons who’s managed to do exactly that before.
Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.