“We’re entering a world where basically the entire economy is going to be tokenized,” Consensys CEO and founder Joseph Lubin said during a fireside chat at the Consensus Miami 2026 conference on Tuesday.
In a fireside chat with Rollup founder Robbie Klages, Lubin said he believes tokenization is no longer experimental but inevitable.
The founder of Consensys, a blockchain company founded by Ethereum co-founder Lubin in 2014, said that the global economy is developing steadily on the chain, and Ethereum is structurally in a position to benefit the most. His company focuses on building infrastructure, development tools and decentralized applications (dApps) for the Ethereum blockchain.
Lubin traced tokenization back to Ethereum’s origins, describing it as a breakthrough that allowed anyone to issue assets without building a new blockchain.
Now, as financial institutions increasingly move their assets onto blockchain rails, early design choices are paying off.
Lubin pointed to the evolution from Bitcoin as the first decentralized token to Ethereum’s role in creating new tokens without the need to build a separate blockchain. He said the technology has reached a level of maturity and is attracting traditional financial institutions and regulators.
“We are now mature enough to be attractive to traditional financial organizations and regulators,” he said, citing Ethereum’s reliability, security and scalability as key differentiators.
He said tokenization is expanding from stablecoins to Treasury bonds and other real-world assets, and more financial activities are expected to move to blockchain infrastructure.
Lubin also outlined Ethereum’s approach to scaling. The capacity of Layer 2 networks continues to increase, and developments such as synchronization composability are designed to allow transactions across multiple networks to be executed in a shared system.
“All transactions on all these different networks will consume ether,” he said, referring to how activity across the ecosystem feeds value back to Ethereum.
He described ETH as a “fiduciary commodity,” arguing that as more economic activity moves on-chain, its role in securing and settling transactions may give it currency characteristics.
Lubin added that the recent disruption in decentralized finance reflects the evolution of the technology, saying the ecosystem is continuing to strengthen through collaboration.
