Crypto innovation has no room for 'silly partisan politics,' says Consensys CEO Joe Lubin

Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin said he is fairly satisfied with the regulatory developments in the U.S., but wishes to see digital asset discussions in Washington to become more bipartisan.

"The silly, silly partisan politics really shouldn't belong in a technology revolution," Lubin said. "Unless you have an agenda and vested interests in preserving the status quo in the financial industry or other industries, you really gotta get behind innovation in the U.S."

Lubin said Consensys is still "in the mix" to support regulatory advancements for crypto and blockchain technology. 

Since Donald Trump's reelection as President, U.S. lawmakers and regulators have accelerated efforts to establish clearer rules for the crypto industry, marked by the passage of the Genius stablecoin bill and ongoing efforts to enact a more comprehensive market structure legislation for digital assets.

At last month's Korea Blockchain Week conference, White House Council of Advisors on Digital Assets' executive director Patrick Witt said he expects to see the crypto market structure bill pass by the end of 2025.

MASK launch signals

Lubin previously said during an interview on The Block's "The Crypto Beat" podcast that MetaMask will be launching its highly anticipated native token MASK sooner than one might expect.

While Lubin declined to give a more concrete timeline on the token launch, he said Thursday that Consensys is working on it "very actively."

Lubin told users to pay attention to other developments in the Consensys ecosystem for potential signals, mentioning Infura's progressive decentralization with DIN.

"If you're paying attention to Linea, there might be signals there," Lubin said. "I think bottom line, we're going to keep rewarding the users of Consensys technology and Ethereum technology. So pay attention, it'll get more and more obvious." 

Linea 2026

Last month, Consensys launched the token generation event for its Ethereum Layer 2 Linea, distributing over 9.36 billion LINEA cryptocurrency to eligible addresses. 85% of the supply was allocated to the growth of the ecosystem, Lubin highlighted.

"We are 100% Ethereum-aligned. All the Consensys clients sync to Linea, which isn't true of other rollups," said Lubin. He added that Linea is 'respecting the mothership' by using and burning Ether with every transaction, a process, combined with burning LINEA tokens, that increases the benefit for token holders.

Linea, as an "extremely friendly" Layer 2 network to institutions, is being favored by U.S. and global institutions to assist their foray in the blockchain field, with Lubin saying that he has heard from the DTCC, Nasdaq and Swift.

Lubin said Consensys will work to progressively decentralize the governance of Linea, which is currently being led by a consortium consisting of Consensys, Eigen Labs, ENS and others, as Lubin said DAO governance is too complicated.

"The Linea consortium has some great stewards, Ethereum-aligned people and projects," Lubin said. "There's more coming, very Ethereum aligned, so we hope to be able to announce that pretty soon."

Consensys also plans to collaborate further with Lubin's ETH treasury firm SharpLink Gaming in the coming year for Linea. Sharplink previously announced that it will stake a portion of its ether holdings on the L2 network.

"SharpLink is going to continue to accumulate [ether] and Linea will be able to do things in terms of risk-adjusted yield that we don't think we're going to see any time soon in the industry," Lubin said. "SharpLink hasn't announced anything, but I think there's a good chance that there will be a huge amount of ether staked on Linea, making EtherX and other things that we're coming out with on Linea the best place to deploy your ether at Layer 2."