Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin directly challenged the view that AI adoption will lead to oligopolies, emphasizing that Ethereum-based decentralized protocols will enable autonomous collaboration among individual economic actors and AI agents.
Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of blockchain infrastructure company Consensys, directly challenged pessimistic economic projections that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) will intensify the concentration of wealth and power in a small number of Big Tech companies and certain countries. He argued that open, decentralized protocols such as Ethereum will serve as a key catalyst for lowering economic barriers to entry and broadly diversifying autonomous economic actors.
Lubin presented his critical view on X, directly referring to the recently published economic essay The Commanding Heights. The 145-page essay, released on October 29 by Will Manidis and Joe Roberts, analyzed that even if AI technology spreads throughout society—as rail networks and power infrastructure did in the past—a very small number of players controlling key bottlenecks, or “commanding heights,” such as data centers and high-performance computing resources would monopolize the gains from value creation. Lubin responded that the analysis interpreted the transition to the AI era solely through the framework of the outdated, centralized power structures of the past, and pointed out that its basic premise—that “someone must necessarily own and control core infrastructure centrally”—was fundamentally flawed.
He predicted that as decentralized protocols become more widely adopted, the existing monopoly system centered on large corporations will break apart and fragment into numerous agile smaller organizations. In particular, he explained that a structure in which individuals organize their own AI agents and lead economic activity by collaborating directly with peers through on-chain smart contracts, without intermediaries, will become widespread. Lubin emphasized that Ethereum will support an autonomous economic ecosystem independent of closed platform ecosystems by providing neutral collaborative infrastructure that guarantees mutual trust without approval from any particular central institution.
He also projected that even if governments in the future adopt crypto-asset technology and build their own decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure, the dominance of the global open DeFi ecosystem will not be shaken. Compared with closed, state-led regulatory networks, he assessed that global DeFi, open to the world, will maintain overwhelming competitiveness in the speed of technological development, capital liquidity and financial innovation.