Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and chief executive of Consensys, used the X-Post on June 19th to provide what could be his most extensive evaluation paper for Ether. After praising the research notes that likened ETH to “digital oil,” Rubin argued that the author was “not bullish enough” about Ethereum’s ultimate economic footprint.
“It’s a very powerful piece in so many ways,” he began. “Perhaps everyone who reads this work learns something and is troubled by the paper. However, this first-class thinking work has one major structural flaw: a rather deep structural flaw. It’s not bullish enough.”
Ethereum could surpass global GDP
Rubin’s argument is that ether supports the “Hybrid Heu Machine Intelligence Society.” That value creation is combined well beyond today’s $113.8 trillion global economy. “That’s not a big leap,” he writes. “It suggests that it is worth living and constitutes a large part of web3. This is orders of magnitude larger than today’s global GDP. Look at how energy, chips and data centre spending is growing exponentially.”
He revives the long-standing Bitcoin and Chest Dichotomy, BTC as “Gold 2.0” as a native asset in the programmable economy, but pushes it even further. “BTC should be rated as gold 2.0, but ETH should be rated at the scale of an urgent decentralized global economy.” Its framing must be extended to account for the AI-charged explosion of digital activities “growing primarily on decentralized rails.”
Lubin dedicated half of his post to his first thought experiment on June 4th. “If you have a magical trust diamond commodity and you can apply this diamond tip to all transactions, agreements or relationships, would you add 10% to your global GDP? 100%? 1,000%?
In his view, Ethereum’s unusually decentralized, decentralized validator sets make ether “in the trust of the highest grade or gold standard on earth.” The “Trust Commodity” premium is tiered over the “digital oil” demand for transaction fees, and Lubin believes it can drive the fully diluted value of ETH well beyond its historical asset benchmarks.
Reality Check – Todai’s Numbers
For now, the gap between suction and market capitalization continues to yawn. Ether’s roughly 120 million coin float traded at $2,525 on June 19, giving the network a market value of nearly $307 billion, accounting for less than 0.3% of global production. But even that float has shrunk: ETH (29% of supply) of over 35 million people are currently locked in demonstration contracts, a record high this week.
Lubin sees such supply-side tightening as a preview rather than a climax. “Both of these models,” he writes about the digital oil and trustworthy product framework. “It leads to ETH’s huge financial premium.”
Whether ether can plausibly “ecco” with a global output (there is a threshold where a single asset is not approaching” excludes the unresolved question. However, Rubin’s rhetorical diamonds hone the interests. In a future where programmable trust is the main input of production, software gas can only prove it and borrow the phrase “not bullish enough.”
At the time of pressing, ETH traded for $2,523.
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