“We are moving toward a world where essentially the entire economy will be tokenized,” said Joseph Lubin, CEO and founder of Consensys during a fireside chat Tuesday at Consensus Miami 2026.
In his fireside chat with The Rollup founder Robbie Klages, Lubin said he believes tokenization is no longer experimental, but inevitable.
The global economy is steadily advancing on-chain and Ethereum is structurally positioned to benefit the most, said the founder of Consensys, a blockchain company founded in 2014 by Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum. His company focuses on building infrastructure, development tools, and decentralized applications (dApps) primarily for the Ethereum blockchain.
Lubin traced tokenization to the origins of Ethereum, describing it as the breakthrough that allowed anyone to issue assets without building a new blockchain.
Now, that initial design choice is paying off as financial institutions are increasingly moving their assets onto blockchain rails.
Lubin pointed to the evolution of bitcoin as the first decentralized token to Ethereum’s role by allowing the creation of new tokens without building separate blockchains. He said the technology has reached a level of maturity that is attracting traditional financial institutions and regulators.
“We are now mature enough to be attractive to traditional financial organizations and regulators,” he said, pointing to Ethereum’s reliability, security and scalability as key differentiators.
He said tokenization is expanding from stablecoins to treasuries and other real-world assets, and more financial activity is expected to shift to blockchain infrastructure.
Lubin also described Ethereum’s scaling approach. Layer 2 networks are increasing in capacity and developments such as synchronous composability aim to allow transactions across multiple networks to be executed within a shared system.
“All of those transactions on all of these different networks are going to burn ether,” he said, referring to how activity across the ecosystem returns value to Ethereum.
He described ETH as a “fiat product,” arguing that its role in securing and settling transactions could give it monetary characteristics as more economic activity moves up the chain.
Lubin added that the recent disruptions in decentralized finance reflect a developing technology and said the ecosystem continues to strengthen through collaboration.
