Blockchain Innovators - Conor Svensson and Joseph Lubin

Hi, it's Conor Svensson here, founder and CEO of Web3 Labs. This is a conversation I had with Joe  Lubin, founder and CEO of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum. Joe is one of the leading voices in  blockchain technology given his part working alongside Vitalik Buterin and a number of others  in launching the Ethereum blockchain. He created ConsenSys back in 2014 with the goal of providing  a commercial entity to drive wider adoption of Ethereum and its technology. I recently hosted Joe  for a fireside conversation at one of our virtual Enterprise Ethereum Alliance meetups. We covered a  number of topics here including ConsenSys's recent commercial successes with its MetaMask wallet  and its funding round which was supported by JP Morgan, Mastercard, Protocol Labs,  the Maker Foundation and others. Also, we got his thoughts on where we're headed with technologies  like central bank digital currencies, NFTs and DAOs and of course, touched on Elon Musk and his  impact on crypto. Given Joe's incredible journey with Ethereum so far it was great to  get his insights on everything that's happening at the moment and I'm sure you'll enjoy it too!  Joe, thank you first of all for making time it's always great to chat and catch up and  certainly have a few dialogues over the years. Yeah and yeah, it's a pleasure to be here and  thanks everyone for coming out and importantly in this context maybe the most significant founding  that I was associated with was ConsenSys being a founding member and prime driver of the EEA  so shout out to the EEA and the formational moments. Definitely, the EEA are so excited  when it was first announced, this is just what enterprise folk wanted to see happen  with Ethereum. So you started ConsenSys as I said earlier back in 2014 and this year,  I think as an observer there's been like a couple of really pivotal things that have  happened with ConsenSys. So back in February, it was reported that  MetaMask was earning a hundred thousand dollars a day via its token swaps functionality so a big  revenue driver. Then also in April there was a 65 million dollar funding round that ConsenSys closed  backed by the likes of JP Morgan, Mastercard, UPS, Protocol Labs and the Maker Foundation. Is  it fair to say that 2021 is the year where you feel you're starting to really see the fruits  of your labor and these bets that you've had, this conviction for all this year pay off? Or  do you feel that you were there earlier or there's still a lot more to happen so to speak  because this is massive news what's already happened in 2021? Yeah, so payoff can mean monetary and numerical. I feel like we've seen so many things pay off over the years as we were  a major contributor to standing up the Ethereum ecosystem for the smart contracts blockchain  ecosystem. The history of ConsenSys is that the mothership ConsenSys Mesh invested in  a lot of projects, incubated a lot of projects and spun out a lot of projects  and built some of the most important projects in the space - developer, tooling, wallet  etc. So some of the biggies are Infura and Truffle developer tool suite, our customer success group,  our diligence security audit group, Quorum (which is the name that we use for a wide  variety of Ethereum node or client solutions both public mainnet and enterprise focus)  and the consumer piece which is also becoming an institutional piece, MetaMask,  is doing astonishingly well. So those groups in addition to a group called Codifi which  builds financial primitives that we can launch into MetaMask for consumers or  pure Truffle for developers and into Quorum for enterprises, those pieces are  part of a spin out called ConsenSys Software Inc. which is a a focused integrated software  product company. So ConsenSys Mesh and ConsenSys Software Inc. proceed in parallel. ConsenSys Mesh  manages portfolio and continues to incubate .... So success yeah, opening up the ecosystem,  having many millions of monthly active users. Being profitable is a nice thing, that round  that you mentioned the 65 million round, brought a bunch of major financial institutions  into a situation where a bunch of organizations in our own ecosystem both invested into the formation  round of ConsenSys Software Inc. and it was a validation of our convergence hypothesis which  is being increasingly validated. That is that the revolutionaries would get out there and  build out the infrastructure and start using the infrastructure and the evolutionaries,  organizations like Santander, JP Morgan etc, some of the pillars of this institution, the EEA,  would make maybe their revolutionaries too because they were early. But the ones behind them  would take advantage of the technology in ways that they're comfortable and ConsenSys  has focused on making it comfortable to use Ethereum Virtual Machine based  technology. Bottom line, it's happening, we've been projecting this for a long time,  this decentralized future. Now we're living in the decentralized future. We've seen the  blockchain, we've seen cryptocurrencies, we've seen other forms of digital assets,  DeFi and especially NFTs crossing the chasm into mainstream awareness and adoption. We were part of the innovators and the early adopters but now the early majority is coming  across the chasm and those technologies are what's doing it so it's all very exciting. We thought we  were living life at exponential acceleration five years ago and we still are and exponential means  that there's a lot to do each day. Yeah, awesome. You touch there on cross crossing the chasm. Do  you think that NFTs specifically have kind of been the thing that's been you one of the big enablers,  well it's been one of the big enablers but do you think that's the pivotal thing? That  or is it more that it's that plus DeFi plus the just wider awareness of crypto?  Well, as the technology matures, gets a little rounded around the edges, fewer sharp edges, it'll  bring in higher and higher hanging fruit -more and more use cases and it'll be usable by less  deeply technologically savvy people. What's happening is a paradigm shift to a new way of  building and organizing the world. So the web basically accomplished the democratization of  access to information, ability to publish, ability to engage in e-commerce, stand-up e-commerce or  do the same for social networks and what we're seeing now is the democratization of  the new foundations of the emerging decentralized digital economy. First foundation is the trust  foundation so that's protocols like Ethereum, the maximally decentralized protocols, layer ones and  the infrastructure like layer two's built on top of that. And it's democratized because it's not  constructed by a small group of entities and controlled top down by centralized institutions,  it is open to technologists, entrepreneurs to build, to fork, to modify, to fix rapidly and  to utilize. So that's the governance layer for the planet essentially. This new trust foundation  is enabling the decentralized financial player for the planet to be constructed  and that's also being done not by centralized institutions but by entrepreneurs and technologists. It's open and accessible and usable  to hopefully everybody at some point soon. I lost my train of thought, can leave it there. Yeah. So  I think you were talking about NFTs being the prime driver? So yeah, it is a prime driver  in opening up our ecosystem and the technology to just many more millions of people and NFTs  will be... it is a profound invention. I think it's going to change the nature of software going  forward. I think it's you know, software's composed of software objects and now we have  software objects that can have unique identity and can pay and be paid, and can vote or decide  and be voted on, and these software objects are going to enable creators or content owners to  directly interact with the consumers or their fans without the intermediaries capturing a huge  proportion of the value in those relationships. The ability to wrap content and programmatically  unbundle or bundle different kinds of rights around that content  so that you could identify far more rights to certain content than what was previously  recognized - so streaming into certain kinds of formats or public performance  and that will just make it so much easier for so many more content creators to make a living. For the first time really we're noticing huge blockchain based meetups and events,  clubhouse etc. that the crypto savvy people are not organizing. So, artists are organizing them  because it's just technology that enables something that they really care about.  Yeah, so the NFTs are kind of pulling people in because on the surface  they can relate to it but then they start scratching beneath the surface quite quickly  and they start to realize how it can be tied with all these other great things. Yeah. So continuing just discussing on the NFT side because there's the Palm Network  that's spun out of ConsenSys or certainly it's a ConsenSys venture. You've certainly had very  significant success with the first project that was put on that with Damien Hirst's pieces. ConsenSys is obviously very excited about the possibilities with NFTs, where do you  see Palm going in terms of this first stage? Is it just doing these drops and giving people the  opportunity to get involved with the collectibles? But, there's got to be some bigger picture things  about how it can start to tie into some other parts of the ecosystem potentially.  Is there a road map or ideas floating around your head about that side at this point in time?  Sure, yeah. So ConsenSys and other companies and people in our ecosystem have been doing NFTs for  a pretty long time. They weren't always called NFTs, our Ujo project issued (that's a music  platform project), issued NFTs a long time ago. Treum was tracking fish and consumer products with  NFTs. Treum has also launched EulerBeats, a really successful generative art NFT set of projects.  Palm is indeed a network that the ConsenSys stood up, there's a company called Palm NFT Studios,  which is related and it's essentially a digital design interactive studio that helps companies  build platforms or do launches. ConsenSys stood up this network because there was a need to create  a low cost, extremely low carbon footprint or energy footprint side chain using exactly the  same Ethereum technologies - MetaMask and Infura - that had a bridge. So it was intimately connected  to Ethereum mainnet and you can move different kinds of tokens across the bridge and was also  very interested in enabling the creator so a creator DAO is in formation and it will be funded  by a large number of Palm tokens. I shouldn't perhaps use the term funded because these Palm  tokens have no value, as we all know, they're just nice tokens that we're putting into the DAO.  People can petition the DAO for some of those tokens in exchange for getting some work done.  Perhaps most importantly, there hasn't been a really great platform on which DeFi  could be built specifically for NFTs. So in the traditional economy, we have these fungible tokens  like money and shares and companies, and a lot of financial infrastructure built up around that.  But there's an enormous amount of value in non-fungible assets - title, mortgages, invoices  etc. and a lot of infrastructure around that in the traditional world. We're going to see  a lot of DeFi infrastructure - automated market makers, lending borrowing systems,  insurance etc. - all build up that is very similar to the fungible token infrastructure but a little  bit different in some cases. So the AMMs will have to be a bit different and I anticipate that  NFTs will play a huge role in providing collateral to different situations. So  Palm is indeed an exciting project and the Damien Hirst launch was spectacular. There's  more experimentation, I think, going to be built on that project and there's a huge backlog or  pipeline of different launches that are lined up that are extremely exciting. There's another one.  Yeah, it's going to be awesome to see these drops happening. Then, to your point there about  the DeFi type support of NFTs, so the recent news for instance was the marketplace OpenSea  actually launching their own tokens so that they can start to move toward DAO type governance and  it got me thinking, is that almost like there's the first step towards that world which is a  bit more analogous to what's happening within the DeFi space with AMMs and so on. That you start to  have that DAO based structure behind the scenes and then you have a token there that can reward  the people selling on top of the platforms. Yeah, so I do think we're in the early days of DAOs but  they're getting very significant. It's going to become absolutely necessary, in my opinion,  to have decentralized governance for many projects if you want to be successful. The approach to regulatory issues, structures, complications is a really interesting one. The SEC, a while ago,  came out with the doctrine of sufficient decentralization and so if you can  demonstrate that your project is really genuinely decentralized then I think that's going to go a  long way to defining a new kind of structure, a new kind of collective structure, that needs to be seen differently and treated differently by regulators. And there are some  incredibly cool, innovative things happening. There's a lot of tooling sprouting up around DAOs.  We have a project called Sobol that essentially enables you to view your organization, your flat organization or your organization that might be composed of circles,  overlapping circles, circles within circles, each representing initiatives, projects, teams  etc. That tool, which is a really remarkable tool, we've used it for quite a while at ConsenSys, is  starting to get really intimate with different DAO projects and providing  some of that infrastructure and other voting systems, treasury management systems,  have been sprouting up that are really exciting. Our friends Hypnosis have built some important  pieces to that and people are building on top of those specifically for DAOs.  The LAO infrastructure is really exciting, Flamingo, Neptune, Bitcoin DAO is exciting. Party DAO is incredibly exciting. So it basically enabled a group of people to,  kind of in real time, organize themselves and establish ownership, purchase collectively and  fractionalize an NFT that they can then legitimately use on their profile.  Fun stuff in the DAO space and so much work to do as it becomes  probably the main way that we organize ourselves in this coming age of community.  Yeah, absolutely. This is such an exciting area that some seems, you're right, that's really going  to be the next big thing that comes to the forefront within blockchain after NFTs and DeFi.  So, just touching a bit more on DeFi, how are you seeing established institutions trying to  get exposure to it? Because MetaMask has got an institutional offer I believe and also of course,  given who ConsenSys' backers were as well with the big names in finance behind you,  there's obviously a lot of interest there too so it'd be great to get your perspective on what,  in your view, what it looks like the institutionalization of DeFi.  So with respect to regulatory issues, we first expect that people will continue to be able to  publish software and that when there are custody issues involved, securities issues involved  and maybe some interfaces for consumers to this published software there may be  some regulatory implications. We've been paying attention to regulatory implications in what is  a fork of our MetaMask client. So MetaMask is really designed for consumers and we're adding  more financial primitives into it, the financial primitives that we operate are essentially  interfaces to underlying financial primitives that other projects publish and we're able to  to aggregate some of those things and provide a really great experience  to them. So swaps is out there, fiat onboarding is out there in MetaMask already and more to come.  With respect to MetaMask Institutional, it adds different kinds of risk management,  KYC, KYT which is 'know your transaction' part of AML capabilities, reporting, tax reporting  at some point. And within an institution, whether it's a trading institution or just one of the  increasingly large number of companies that are taking crypto in their business as payment,  they are all gonna need to understand their workflow, understand the security around who's  able to do what sorts of transactions and so we're paying a lot of attention to  building workflow and making different roles, different permissions explicit and enabling  organizations to be internally secure and implement their processes  institutions themselves. You know, Michael Saylor has done a great job of activating corporations  to think about what's going on with issued money, that it's depreciating and not yielding very much  and Justin Drake has done a really great job of alerting lots of people about what's going on  with ultra sound money. So bitcoin is digitally sound money, gold is sound money and Ethereum is  fast becoming ultra sound money - a deflationary asset. We're going to see a lot of organizations  move, people in organizations move from that sort of weaker monetary system into this  growing monetary system where the assets are growing in value and yielding significantly.  Hedge funds, the smaller financial institutions have been aware of this for quite a while. Major  multi-billion dollar funds are now deploying money in the space and even the more conservative  financial institutions are tooling up, if not active already, but they have to be slow  movers because they're regulated and it's gonna take a little more time to get permission from  their internal and external legal counsel. And so expanding  on that, is it something that you feel that there's limits there in terms of how far we  can go? You reference the nation of ultra sound money and this idea that with the fractional  reserve banking system, the monetary system that kind of underpins our nations you've kind of got  that narrative but then on the other side you've got these central banks looking at  central bank digital currency approaches. With that sort of approach it doesn't change  the ... it still states 'managed' a lot of these are centrally managed these different currency  systems and cdbc's with blockchain, can make it more efficient but it doesn't change the narrative  and move it towards this idea of ultra sound money. So do you envisage that at one level you've  got the kind of more maximalist view which is like everyone's going to go to the ultra sound money,  decentralized, code defined digital assets but then on the other side you've got regulators  who no doubt that there's going to come a point where they're not happy with everyone just jumping  to these other monetary systems. So where do you feel that the right balance is and do you have any  insights into where the regulators feel it needs to be? Because, they're not going to want everyone  to be as radical say as Michael Saylor with adopting bitcoin as their primary reserves. So  nation states should have their own token and they should be using the best technology to implement  their own money system. It should be aligned with their own philosophical political principles.  We will see. So ConsenSys is doing a bunch of work on central bank digital currency projects with  different central banks around the world. There's significant interest. It's hard to say adoption at  this point because it's still early for central banks. Some are further along than others but  the Ethereum technology is in the lead, in my opinion, in terms of interest from central banks  partly because it's just a rock-solid technology compared to many other technologies,  even if it's only used for cryptocurrency. I think there's an understanding that  if you're a central bank you don't just want to stand up a monetary system, you might want to  think about the future and realize that your monetary system should probably support  smart contracts because monetary system is going to be a foundational layer for the whole economy.  Central banks increasingly, they certainly have dominance, if not monopoly,  on being the money system in the nation state. They're increasingly competitive with one another  because some of them influence or have regional influence in regional usage for their money,  some of them have global usage for their money, EU and  primarily the US and this competition is really interesting. They're gonna have to  make technological decisions that enable them to continue to do business and do business well  because it is after all, a nation-state level of business. But they're also facing challenges from  open systems from ether and Ethereum and Bitcoin and others and that's going to cause them  to make design decisions that will enable them to keep up with the capabilities offered  by these other systems and also make decisions about how they want to interoperate with other  networks. So the BIS is doing some work to link up different CBDC projects, or at least  facilitate the linking at some point in the future, and it'll be really interesting  if and when these nation state money systems connect up to permissionless  smart contract platforms potentially. It may be the case that let's say, the Federal Reserve token  could be permissionlessly mirrored and wrapped on Ethereum for instance so  if you for instance, freeze it on the Fed network or whatever that ends up being, you could  issue a sort of wrapped version on the other network. So, fascinating times  coming in the future with respect to how nation-state currencies and other digital  assets inter-operate. Most important to me, I think, is choice. There should be lots of  optionality so that we can build different kinds of monetary systems and choose the right ones for  the use case. Yeah, you can almost see it playing out where like these nation states start to  launch their own projects, all these different decentralized projects doing 'if you subscribe  our token then you get health care/ you get education/ you get all these perks', that  come I guess with tax revenue, so yes, it's really cool to hear your perspective on that. Yeah, the  country of Facebook tried to do that! Yeah, yeah, true! So let's just move to some of the bigger  industry trends. What do you think of Elon Musk's impact on crypto and blockchain more generally?  Well, first his impact on the planet is just amazing. He's an awesomely talented human being  doing great things in interesting ways for all of us. The first thing to notice is that the memes signaling is incredibly powerful especially  as the world is configured right now with social networking making it a very small world  for many people. That's great when he embraced Bitcoin, he sort of made positive  noises about Ethereum early on and made a lot of barking, positive barking sounds,  around Doge. So he embraced Bitcoin then he had to pull back basically because of the  perceived energy issues, carbon issues. That was not because he just did an analysis and  and suddenly realized 'hey Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity', it was basically because he  has grants and other sorts of things that he needed to not endanger.  So I think he's navigated that situation pretty well, Doge is the same technology so roughly,  Litecoin based technologies, a little bit different would be subject to the same sorts of  problems if it got really big. So it's great that he's paying attention and validating our ecosystem  from his perch. He certainly likes attention, he likes running little mini social experiments by  putting out a word or a phrase and seeing how all the humans scurry and try to interpret  it. I feel like it'd be nice if he understood how impactful his utterances are because an utterance  can be taken very seriously and impact lots of people both positively and perhaps  negatively if they're financially exposed. Most importantly no doubt, he and his companies have  deep strategies that they'll weave into their products and services so I'm looking forward to  seeing Tesla, SpaceX, power electricity infrastructure, robots etc all be natively  adopting the cryptocurrency and decentralized protocol infrastructure  in interesting ways. Especially the flamethrowers, really interesting to see how he will reach  cryptocurrencies into his flamethrower product. Yeah as part of the product he put out there. So one of the things that comes up, I mean personally, I've always thought of  Ethereum a bit like Linux in that it's more than a technology, it's a movement because it's art,  it's got some solid technology there but the bigger thing is you've got all these passionate  people around the world who form this community who really believe in what they're building. So  that to me, when I first looked at blockchain, was really what pulled me towards Ethereum. However,  there's a couple of other views that some people have, some people talk in terms of Ethereum might  be hot right now but it's the Myspace of the web3. It's like there's lots of people using it  but it's not going to be the thing. Or there's other projects who are thinking 'oh well let's  make Bitcoin more like Ethereum and add DeFi to it', 'let's create a new layer one technology to  displace Ethereum'. What's your view on that and why people feel compelled there? I mean,  if someone came to you with any of those narratives how would you respond? So first,  I and ConsenSys believe in a world of many kinds of decentralized protocols, many doing different  things, many doing very similar things and all linked up in useful ways and interoperating  with one another. So basically, we're seeing the formation of the increasingly decentralized web  and it feels a little bit silly to equate Ethereum to an application. The MySpace application used  a bunch of technologies, http, html, tcp etc and the Ethereum is much closer to that layer  so it's closer to the enabling foundational infrastructure of the web than it is to just an  application that ran on the web. But your point is will it go, be replaced by Ethereum killers? First I think it's really great and necessary for our ecosystem to  broadly explore the solution space and Ethereum has certainly established itself as the leading  candidate to be a major component in the foundational layer of the trust layer of the  digital future and the digital assets element layer. Maybe the decentralized finance hub  of the digital future. There will be many other projects and many layer twos that are  going on Ethereum as the layer one, or other layer ones, many layer ones that will connect  laterally to Ethereum so, I don't know. It's still early in the development of our ecosystem  but Ethereum has established itself as the hub that everything is connecting to and the reference  that nearly everything is comparing itself against or riffing off of and so  no concerns about Ethereum going away. I think it will remain foundational  and a major component of the infrastructure going forward and there's some great projects out there,  but Ethereum is so far ahead in terms of size of ecosystem, number of transactions per day,  amount of value flowing and amount of value being created and amount of a number of new projects  and new technologists entering the ecosystem. The Ethereum 2 project is about to merge  with the Ethereum 1 execution network and enable Ethereum to catch up and leapfrog  significantly with respect to scalability. Layer twos are already doing that  so it's really exciting to see significant scalability and cost reductions but hopefully lots of those great projects will  via different architectures or different tunings of different architectures develop to subserve  different kinds of use cases very similar to how different database technologies -  Graph, SQL etc. do subserve different kinds of use cases on our current compute infrastructure.  Yeah and you mentioned the upcoming merge with Ethereum and that's something that  ConsenSys has invested very heavily in their R+D and Ben Edgington was here last month talking  about the cutting edge there so it must be great to see it finally getting close because it's  something that no doubt, a lot of time has been invested into to get to this point. Shout out  to Ben Edgington, he's up there and he's doing a spectacular job in steering ConsenSys in the  Ethereum 2 direction and helping steer the whole ecosystem, the whole Ethereum 2 ecosystem. It's  good, this is gonna be awesome when they cut over happens. Right, so we're gonna just turn  it over to the audience, we've got a couple of questions in the chat. If people have any other  questions they'd like to ask please put them in. I can't guarantee we'll get through them all but  it's going to be good if there's some burning questions people have. This is one from Frances,  between adopting an existing public blockchain such as Ethereum versus building their own,  where do you see the central banks leaning towards and why? So the quick answer is  they have a lot of responsibility. They need to be extremely prudent.  They need to move slowly and not break entire economies and so they will stand up their own  solutions on their own networks. They will likely build bridges in time or other people will build  bridges to public permissionless systems. My view is that the public permissionless infrastructure  should be at the foundation of everything going forward  and that we'll see private permissioned networks in the form of just software-defined network,  applications being built on top of permissionless infrastructure in just the same way the internet  is. At its foundations, the internet technology is permissionless it's grown up in layers and  the higher level layers are regulated but you can stand up to your own internet if you want  to and if you figure out how to connect into the main internet then you have permissionlessly  become part of the internet. And, what's your view on the US governments and Fed's attitude towards  cryptocurrencies? Do you expect more hostile regulations or warm embraces from this point on?  Both! Absolutely, so we expect some people to attempt to shut things down or really slow things  down so that they can position themselves for this paradigm shift. We don't expect... first of all,  many things that have been discussed are impossible to implement and  regulators will realize that. Rule makers like people in Treasury and the IRS, will make  sensible rules once given mandates from the politicians. Bottom line, the Curve cafuffle  that we listened to a couple weeks ago around the infrastructure bill, it was really great for our  ecosystem it put cryptocurrency explicitly on the tax radar - a healthy thing. It awakened 100 senators to the fact, in the United States,  to the fact that there's this massive thing going on worth trillions of dollars and they're trying to backdoor regulate it.  I think it's Ted Cruz, I think he was speaking to that body and he basically said  something like 95% of you have no clue about what this technology is and how it works and  we all need to get some education before we attempt to make laws that will  sort of implicitly regulate it. So I think it's all going to go very well. We at ConsenSys are  really comfortable that things that we care about won't be improperly or poorly regulated.  And if there's some light regulation around the edges, especially the gateways between the  financial, the traditional financial ecosystem and the decentralized ecosystem and it's already  significantly regulated, but even a little bit is probably not going to be... they won't turn  every individual and smart contract into a virtual asset service provider that needs to  spy on and report on all of its peers. Okay, so another one from Timothy Coleman as a follow-up,  as ConsenSys has been moving from a spokes model to separating the tech and investment arms, do you  believe in the blockchains for hashes, databases for data view of some players in the space and if  so how could this lead to a change in the tech side at ConsenSys five years down the line?  So there's certainly lots of use cases with respect to blockchains for hashes,  validation of what went on. There are technologies like Baseline that enable  organizations to sync up their internal systems of record processes and data and agreements  with those of counterparties and use Ethereum mainnet to basically serve as a global again system of record  to log zero knowledge proofs that keep those disparate systems in sync. Most of the enterprise,  the really successful enterprise projects, are around provenance or digital assets  and so we do a bunch of work on that front, we have products on that front.  We are in the middle of launching something called Quorum Blockchain Service, which is a managed  service on Azure and essentially working intimately with Microsoft to migrate  many hundreds of projects potentially from Azure blockchain service to foreign blockchain service  and so we will see a bunch of those traditional use cases and there's some good ones out there.  There are a lot of companies using blockchain in a private permission context including Microsoft  itself, so we'll see those persist. We're focusing on enabling enterprise to access  mainnet to access DeFi, to access especially NFTs increasingly and we see a convergence  coming and or building up the tools for that. And my final question, this is from Jack,  do you see low code or even maybe even no code playing a significant role in  getting more people building on top of Ethereum? Of course, there's challenges with things like  for new people working with a wallet and so on and what's your view? Absolutely, we have a no code,  low code specialist who's been thinking about and building some of that stuff for a long time in  a more traditional context. He's about to be unleashed in that direction. Cool, look forward  and announcing it soon! Joe, it's been fantastic to host you here today and thanks again. It's been  really, really great to hear your views on where we are, it's just wonderful to see where we are  now in 2021 with respect to blockchain and where ConsenSys has got to in the overall ecosystem.  I'm sure 12 months from now, well it'll be less than that, six months or less,  we'll be celebrating being off of proof of stake as well, sorry proof of work and transitioned onto  proof of stake so plenty still to happen but really excited to just hear everything that  yourself and ConsenSys have been doing. Thanks Conor, thanks everyone.