Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin threw his weight behind the cohort of Ethereum treasury companies at Consensus 2026, calling the digital asset treasury model a "pretty profound innovation" and naming Strategy, SharpLink, and BitMine as genuine long-term stewards of the ecosystem.

Speaking to The Block's Gareth Jenkinson at the conference, Lubin said well-executed treasury programs — which he referred to as DATs — are "a very valuable, powerful, important construct or primitive for our space and for the traditional finance space."

Still, he drew a hard line between mission-driven programs and what he called shallow copycats.

"If you do a dumb copycat DAT on a pretty weak token or an ecosystem that doesn't likely have a lot of durability, you're just harming your ecosystem," Lubin said.

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Strategy, Bitmine, and SharpLink (SBET) — where Lubin serves as chairman — are the counterexamples he cited. In his opinion, these are organizations building "long-term permanent capital" with no leverage, structured to absorb volatility and grow ether's value over time.

Not all of those permanent capital pledges have held. Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said on an earnings call that the firm "will probably" liquidate some bitcoin holdings to fund STRC dividends — a reversal of earlier commitments.

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Lubin’s view on DeFi

Notably, he singled out Tom Lee's execution at Bitmine for praise. Lubin said he and Lee have recently discussed jointly speaking out on the intersection of machine intelligence and decentralized protocols — a convergence both are tracking closely.

The two firms talk regularly, Lubin added, including around the Kelp DAO exploit recovery earlier this year, which drew in Aave, LayerZero, and other major protocol participants.

Consensys and Lubin personally contributed 30,000 ETH to the DeFi United initiative, which reportedly pushed the broader effort past $300 million.

Rather than reading the incident as a stress test that DeFi failed, Lubin invoked an anti-fragile frame. He compared protocol exploiters to "self-appointed consultants" who surface weaknesses in early financial infrastructure.

Lubin also said that machine intelligence will increasingly enable the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem to build formally verifiable protocol pipelines that can mathematically prove that a system's implementation conforms exactly to its design.

"It's going to be messy for a little while," he stated, putting that window at six to twelve months. "But we're moving into maybe what could be considered a golden age in software technology, where it's just super robust because the machines are helping us build it."

On the Layer 2 front, Lubin confirmed Consensys is contributing the Linea technology to the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, the same organization that absorbed Consensys's BESU execution client years earlier.

BESU now runs production infrastructure at DTCC, BNY, and Citi Token Services, across tens of private permissioned deployments.

Lubin positioned Linea as effectively BESU 2.0: a zero-knowledge-proof Layer 2 built on the same EVM foundation, designed to give enterprise institutions a 100% EVM-compatible entry point into Ethereum in a format they already know.

Linea is also implementing synchronous composability, or what Lubin called "the holy grail of our ecosystem." The feature enables atomic transactions across multiple Layer 2s within a single block, without requiring a hard fork.

Gnosis's Ethereum Economic Zone framework, which The Block covered in March when Gnosis and Zisk announced it with co-funding from the Ethereum Foundation, is helping bridge Layer 1 and Layer 2 into a unified execution context.

Ethereum, TradFi, and quantum computing

Traditional finance is squarely at the top of Lubin's growth agenda for Ethereum.

The SharpLink chairman estimated global traditional financial assets at roughly $600 to $700 trillion, compared with DeFi's few trillion today, arguing that Ethereum's credible neutrality, decade-plus track record, and security depth make it the natural destination for Russell 1000 stocks, Treasurys, and exchange-traded funds as they migrate onchain. His thoughts echo a plethora of institutional predictions that expect Ethereum and onchain ecosystems to onboard U.S. capital markets through tokenization.

On quantum computing, Lubin said Ethereum's path to quantum safety is already woven into its existing scaling roadmap. It’s "a nice side effect" of protocol improvements already planned, Lubin stated, and he also confirmed that Consensys is funding Starkware's research on hash functions.

Bitcoin's situation is thornier, he argued.

Lubin opined that the community will eventually need to impose a hard deadline for migrating away from vulnerable address types. Bitcoin researchers recently proposed BIP-361 to gradually sunset these legacy signatures and restrict quantum-vulnerable funds.

Migrating away from these addresses could create genuine property-rights complications, Lubin said, particularly given his longstanding view that Satoshi Nakamoto's identity has effectively been determined.

He named cypherpunk Len Sassaman and early Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney as the candidates he finds most compelling, adding that he believes "they got at least part of the story correct" in a nod to a recent Satoshi documentary based on a four-year investigation led by New York Times bestselling author William D. Cohan and private investigator Tyler Maroney.

Asked about a Consensys IPO to open the interview, Lubin employed a tight-lipped approach. "Going public seems like a good idea for organizations in our space," he said. "I wish that on lots of them and us."

The Block reported in October that Consensys is working with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs on a potential listing.

The Block's full interview with Joseph Lubin will be published later today.