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Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin ignited ETH discourse on August 30 with an unusually expansive thesis about the network’s monetary and institutional trajectory, arguing that Wall Street will migrate its core infrastructure onto Ethereum rails and that ETH “will likely 100x from here,” ultimately “flippen[ing] the Bitcoin/BTC monetary base.”
“I am 100% aligned with almost all of what Tom @fundstrat says here,” Lubin wrote, before mapping out a future in which major financial firms “stake, run validators, [and] operate L2s/L3s,” build DeFi exposure and “write smart contract software for agreements, processes and financial instruments.”
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He singled out JPMorgan as a bank already steeped in Ethereum technology since “2014–2015.” “The one quibble that I have with what Tom has been saying… he is not nearly bullish enough,” Lubin added. “But the real problem is that it is not possible to be bullish enough.”
Lubin’s Big Plans For Ethereum
Lubin also attempted to puncture a popular narrative about scaling tradeoffs, contending that “the narrative of L2s cannibalizing L1 will very soon be shattered.” He pointed readers to Consensys’ Linea network and a newly public “Proof-of-Burn” initiative as examples of coordination mechanisms that could strengthen Ethereum’s base layer economics rather than dilute them.
The second leg of Lubin’s thesis centered on tokenizing Ethereum’s burn into a transferable primitive dubbed BETH, introduced last week by the Ethereum Community Foundation (ECF). In follow-up posts, Lubin prodded the ecosystem to “dig into all the ramifications of tokenizing and explicitly accounting for burned ETH,” even floating a playful incentive experiment: “Would you burn a bit of ETH for [a @BanklessHQ] episode? … Would some of you send some of that BETH to @BanklessHQ?” Beyond media stunts, he sketched potential demand sinks and governance uses: “Would there be a growing demand for BETH as it takes on signaling and voting power in many different contexts?”
Under the ECF design, BETH is an immutable ERC-20 that mints 1:1 when ETH is provably destroyed. The contract forwards deposits to the canonical burn address and issues BETH to the depositor; supply equals cumulative burned ETH by construction, with no admin keys and no redemption path back to ETH. This makes burn—not issuance—the productive act that yields a new asset representing alignment with scarcity. The reference implementation and contract address were published by ECF alongside a blog explainer.
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Lubin then speculated on derivative layers that might emerge on top of BETH—“BBETH, BBBETH, etc.”—as context-specific assets. He analogized this to early “colored coins” on Bitcoin, with a critical distinction: these “shades of BETH” would live natively in Ethereum’s token standards and tooling, eliminating the off-chain recognition problem that stymied first-generation experiments. “One could think of [BBETH/BBBETH] as a more refined element of ‘cracked ETH’… more scarce,” Lubin wrote, suggesting games and other constrained economies as potential testbeds.
The near-term market framing came via Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, whose latest public commentary has been notably constructive on Ethereum’s institutional arc. Lee has argued that Wall Street’s operational stack is migrating to blockchains, that ETFs and staking rails provide investable wrappers for compliance-first capital, and that Ethereum could be the “biggest macro trade over the next ten to fifteen years.” Lubin, for his part, said the two “get on calls intermittently” to coordinate strategy in areas of overlap while “competing in highly differentiated ways.”
At press time, ETH was trading around $4,399.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
