- Bitcoin evangelist Jimmy Song and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin made a bet in 2018 now worth between $1.5 million and $1.9 million in crypto
- But the details were “never finalised,” Song tells DL News
Five years ago, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin and Bitcoin evangelist Jimmy Song made a high stakes bet on the future of Ethereum. The results are in, and it appears Song would have won.
But “the bet was never finalised,” Song said.
“We needed to finalise the arbiter and specific terms,” he told DL News. “I chased him for months on those and I couldn’t pin him down.”
Lubin did not respond to requests for comment sent to public relations representatives at his company, ConsenSys.
In 2018, the pair shared a stage at Consensus, a crypto conference organised by CoinDesk. Song, a so-called Bitcoin maximalist, said he saw no future for Ethereum. Lubin said he would bet “any amount of Bitcoin” Song was wrong.
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A year later, they hammered out the details: If Ethereum had five unique decentralised applications, or dApps, with at least 10,000 daily users and 100,000 monthly users during any six months in any calendar year before May 23, 2023, Lubin would win 810.8 ETH. That was worth about $600,000 in 2018, and about $1.5 million today.
If Ethereum did not have five popular applications, Song would win 69.74 Bitcoin, worth about $600,000 in 2018 and almost $1.9 million Tuesday.
It seems as though Song would have won, though technicalities — are layer 2 blockchains, such as Optimism, dApps? — could have tipped the bet in Lubin’s favour. It was disagreement over those technicalities that apparently killed the bet.
”He was trying to include all sorts of stuff into the active user metric, like posting an offer on some centralized server,” Song said. “I disagreed and I never heard back.”
Without layer 2 blockchains, it appears only Uniswap, the preeminent decentralised exchange, and NFT marketplace OpenSea have regularly hit 10,000 daily users and 100,000 monthly users, according to data from DappRadar.
From August 2020 through the end of 2021, more than 20,000 crypto wallets interacted with Uniswap V2 almost every day, according to DappRadar. During the final seven months of 2021, the tail-end of crypto’s bull run, more than 10,000 crypto wallets interacted with a newer version of the Uniswap protocol, Uniswap V3, daily.
Interest in V3 dropped along with crypto hype in 2022, but traders flocked back during a recent memecoin frenzy.
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Between July 2021 and April, more than 10,000 crypto addresses interacted with OpenSea daily, according to DappRadar. Over the past month, about 5,000 crypto addresses interacted with OpenSea daily.
Then there’s the issue of measuring an application’s user base. One person can control multiple crypto wallets. And few — if any — decentralised applications perform know-your-customer checks, making it difficult to measure how many users they actually have.
High stakes bets are popular with industry high-rollers. Last year, pseudonymous crypto trader GCR made a $10 million bet on the future of Terra with Do Kwon, who was recently arrested in Montenegro.
The money was put in escrow, and GCR officially won in March of this year.
This story has been updated to include an additional comment from Song.
Have tips? Contact the author at aleks@dlnews.com.