In recent months, anger at the U.S. government’s increasing hostility to crypto has—perhaps unsurprisingly—taken on a partisan flavor, with many industry leaders laying blame at the feet of individual Democrats, including But Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin sees things differently. To him, the root cause of crypto’s crisis in America may not be the fault of any individual political actor—or even one political party. “It might go beyond that,” Lubin said in an exclusive interview with Lubin believes that crypto and decentralization pose an existential threat to the global influence long enjoyed by the American state in cooperation with traditional finance. Thus, he figures, some nonpartisan element representing long-term American global interests may be behind the country’s accelerating crypto resistance. The idea has echoes of what The speculative agenda borrows its name from the very real ““It’s pretty obvious that the United States likes to operate top-down, to control as much of the world as it can—through, especially, financial intermediaries,” Lubin said. “This technology doesn’t make guarantees that the bank holding companies will maintain their edge long-term.”“So maybe it goes deeper,” he added.As Lubin sees it, a so-called “clash of civilizations” between decentralization advocates like himself and the entrenched American establishment has always been something of an inevitability. In that light, he said, the SEC’s current Last month, Consensys, the Ethereum software company founded by Lubin, filed a As far as Lubin’s theory about Wall Street’s secret hand in crypto’s current woes goes, there are a couple of caveats. For one, he says, it’s just speculation. And second, it’s not like traditional finance has been wholly opposed to blockchain innovation: Most But, Lubin says, profiting off crypto ETFs is a far cry from endorsing genuine decentralization. Wall Street firms could easily enrich themselves on Bitcoin ETFs while, at the same time, fighting to prevent companies like Consensys from building a decentralized future.“All of them can do well on this technology,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t want to just perpetuate the system for as long as they can.”
