Joseph Lubin

This is your host, Jamil Hasan, the Crypto Hipster.

And today, I am joined by Tom Borgers, who is the co-founder and CEO of Wallapay.

Tom's journey takes us from early Bitcoin and Ethereum through consensus and into the complicated reality of moving money across borders.

He and his brother Dimitri have set out to address a problem that technology alone has not solved yet, and that's making financial infrastructure work across currencies, institutions, and countries.

That's a very good question.

I think the early days of ConsenSys were... were very unique in the sense that it was an environment that really fostered emergent development, which is a property that you really needed at the time to develop these decentralized systems, right? These were systems that were completely new.

And the founder there, Joe Lubin, who was also a co-founder of Ethereum, really enabled innovative people and builders to build completely new systems unfettered from the usual kind of restraints and constraints that you have in a company.

And so obviously that can be a double edged sword, right? In the beginning, it was incredibly useful because it allowed for the emergence of really foundational pieces of infrastructure in the crypto space.

But two things actually catalyzed that required us to step up and be stewards, not controllers.

ethereum is not owned by anyone uh the protocol is neutral decentralized censorship resistant but i think the two things that we realized are one this summer when the ethereum foundation was intentionally making themselves smaller the idea of addition through subtraction focused more on crops privacy the long-term health of the protocol there were really talented groups that were getting spun out of the ethereum foundation And a number of stewards, Tom Lee at Bitmine, Joe Lubin personally, Sharplink, ended up funding three or four of these ecosystem spinoffs who are focused on privacy for institutions, scaling the L1, including shorter block speeds and times, and then the go-to-market, which was Ethereum Institutional.

The idea that we could provide funding because it's in the best interest of not only the ecosystem, but our shareholders.

And then the second thing, so that is funding talent and the roadmap.

So the EF focuses on research and development.

And with the backing of Dick Mine, Tom Lee, Sharp Link, Joseph Shalom, Joe Lubin, and some Ethereum co-founders have a dedicated institutional adoption entity for Ethereum.

That's incredible.

So you guys have been working on this for a while before spinning off.

And there was an Ethereum conference, a meetup, an Ethereum meetup.

And Joe Lubin was there.

And it was so weird because Max and I, this was like 2016.

This was part of a tech conference, some sort of tech conference that was going on, an internet web sort of conference, and the Web Summit.

I did it in crypto.

I worked for ConsenSys, which was Joe Lubin's company, the co-founder of Ethereum.

Nice.

Sort of in the earlier days of ConsenSys.

But yeah, so Ethereum Institutional, for many people who may not know, it was actually launched in July of this year, so it is a fairly young organization.

Uh, it's led by David Walsh, Marius Smith, Matthew Dawson, uh, and it's backed by some of the big names on Ethereum that you probably have heard of, BitMine, SharpLink, Joe Lubin's, uh, an investor in this, uh, plus, uh, dozens of other contributors.

Uh, but it is a nonprofit.

The mission is to be the credible, neutral front door for financial institutions, banks, asset managers, anyone who's basically evaluating Ethereum to tokenize something like funds, stable coins, and basically transform the on-chain financial plumbing that they have here.

While that was happening...

Yeah, Joe Lubin and ConsenSys selling $48 million worth of Sharplink.

This is a point that has kind of been hit on.

Now, many people would look at the two telling stories here and say, oh, this might look bad for Ethereum.