Joseph Lubin calls high Ethereum gas fees a ‘measure of the network’s success’

High fees in the Ethereum network are a ‘measure of success’ and are explained by ‘growing pains’. This view was expressed by ConsenSys co-founder and CEO Joseph Lubin in an interview with Decrypt.

Discussion of gas-price issues in the blockchain of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap reignited after a highly emotional thread on Twitter by Three Arrows Capital’s founder Su Zhu at the end of November.

He criticised Ethereum for high fees and said that he would walk away from it ‘despite having supported it in the past’. Due to the gas costs, the blockchain is inaccessible to newcomers, he added.

“These are growing pains — something that cannot be avoided. When a new technology becomes successful, scaling problems always arise. So, whether it’s CPU cycles, screen size, or memory, you usually turn to programmers to push the technology’s capabilities to the maximum. And it turns out we see consumers pushing the blockchain’s capabilities to the limit,” Lubin says.

According to him, Ethereum 2.0 will help reduce both transactional costs and energy consumption. He expects the launch of the second iteration of the network in ‘the second, perhaps the third quarter of next year’.

Lubin also noted that the Ethereum scalability problem is being addressed through layer-2 solutions.

“Here we see hundreds, or rather tens of thousands of transactions per second, which are actually very cheap — on a level with Solana and Avalanche. Both systems are cool, by the way, but as they are used more by consumers, fees in them rise,” says the head of ConsenSys.

In November, the company closed a financing round of $200 million, which valued it at $3.2 billion. For some institutional investors, notably JPMorgan, investments in ConsenSys became a proxy route into the crypto industry, Lubin said.

“They are large, regulated banking institutions, so it’s not easy for them to do this directly,” he emphasised.

Earlier, Lubin said that Ethereum would become the ‘economy of the next generation’ and would be an order of magnitude larger than Bitcoin.

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