Andrew Keys leads capital markets activity for ConsenSys, a company that builds applications to support the ethereum network. Previously, he was ConsenSys’ head of global business development. Keys co-created the first ethereum blockchain-as-a-service offering with Microsoft and he was a founding member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, an open-source, cross-industry initiative. He spoke with Quartz’s Matthew De Silva.
Quartz: Why should the average person still care about blockchain?
Keys: It’s the next generation of the world wide web. The internet that we know now commoditized how humans communicate, and the evolution of the internet will commoditize how humans trust, agree, and transact with each other.
What do you mean by that?
There are three core components to the next generation of the world wide web. From these, you will have the same user experience, but in a peer-to-peer construct.
What are those components?
First is the notion of self-sovereign identity. You will log into a [personal] browser. Unlike Google Chrome or Firefox or Internet Explorer, it will be a repository for identity, reputation, and assets.
The second component is smart contracts, which are the evolution of our agreements. Our agreements [e.g., rental agreements, legal documents] will turn into software code. Essentially, they will be “if-then-else” statements. Because we can do this digitally, we can create new types of agreements—for example, employment contracts where we’re paid by the minute and programmable food stamps that forbid the purchase of alcohol, sugar, or tobacco.
The third component is the digitization, or “tokenization,” of assets. Assets that are natively analog, that are held by some type of intermediary like a trustee or custodian, they will become natively digital, and you’ll be able to move them via smart contracts. Right now, we can send an email to communicate, but [in the next version of the web] we’ll be able to move barrels of oil or cartons of milk or electrons on a solar panel through a smart contract.
Who do you think blockchains will benefit?
I think they will improve everybody’s wellbeing. What this is doing is upgrading the way that society operates itself—financially, socially, and legally.
In places that lack basic internet infrastructure, will there be a leap forward?
I hope so. Yes, we’re going to need wifi. Our hope is that as the price of cellphones falls and there’s more economic equality, this will help the unbanked.
What do you think the future is for government-backed currency?
I think there will always be a need for fiat currency. I think it will evolve in a digital format. I foresee central banks issuing digitally native, fiat currency—not things like bitcoin. I think we’ll see digitized versions of the dollar, the euro, and so on.
Arguably, we already have electronic versions of government-backed currencies. So, what’s the crypto advantage?
The doubts you’ve seen from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have been primarily about decentralized assets [which would be out of their control]. They can use a next-generation database to create a digital version of the assets, where they’re the primary issuer. The upgrade of blockchains is that central banks will have real-time gross settlement. Today, trade involves a three-day latency, but if the trade is the settlement, [then there’s no delay].
What will it take for mass adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrencies?
Three things: scalability, confidentiality, and user-experience improvements. People need to be able to do a million transactions per second.
How do you see the current internet?
The legacy internet is, essentially, an oligopoly, and you know them just as well as me—Facebook, Uber, eBay. [The common thread is that] you have some type of intermediary that provides trust—a payment rail [or identity verification]—and they are either paid as middleman or they extract your information and sell it [through advertising]. We can commoditize what those intermediary, legacy internet giants provide now.
For example, we can [verify identity during] every transaction and we don’t have to pay Uber to provide that. We will start seeing the evolution of new business models. So, basically, I think that what we’ve seen [with blockchains] is the early stages of the next generation of the internet and it’s been very engineering centric.
What do you mean by “engineering centric”?
Software developers have been learning a new way to create databases and the new types of tools that are surrounding them, and now, they will start to build applications.
To be completely frank, they will start out as crappy applications. They won’t have the best scalability metrics. They won’t have the best privacy metrics. They probably won’t have the best business models. But [akin to] the virality of Web 2.0, you’ll have like one out of every 1,000 apps go viral. Which ones those are, I’m not sure yet.
What does ConsenSys hope to accomplish during 2019?
I think we’ll see the maturation of our projects. I think the entire blockchain ecosystem is extremely nascent. This is very early days. The parallels that I’ve given—and the predictions that you probably read—are that 2019 is the equivalent of 1995, if dial-up started in 1996.
What are ConsenSys’ greatest needs in the next six months?
More time, more coffee, more engineers. (laughter)
I would say hyper-focus is probably our biggest need. We’re seeing a world of competition and experimentation. Now, we have to take all of our learnings to build the production versions. We must cross the chasm from applications that were great hypotheses to working applications, where tens of millions of users can enjoy them.
This interview was conducted in two parts. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.