Joining Consensys & decentra-mania

I joined Consensys a few weeks ago. This is not the career move my 22-year-old self would have predicted. My background is in social impact — international development, education, civic tech. Blockchain wasn’t on my radar until recently, and honestly, most of what I saw in the crypto space looked like speculation dressed up as revolution.

So why am I here?

Not for the tokens. Not for the hype. I’m here because I think decentralized technology is the most important development in human coordination since the internet itself, and I want to help build it before we waste the opportunity.

Technology as coordination infrastructure

Here’s the lens that made crypto make sense to me: every major leap in human capability has been a leap in coordination technology.

Language let small groups coordinate. Writing let coordination persist across time. Law let strangers coordinate through shared rules. Markets let coordination scale through price signals. The internet let coordination happen at zero marginal cost across any distance.

Each of these technologies didn’t just make existing coordination faster — it enabled entirely new forms of organization. Markets weren’t just faster barter. The internet wasn’t just faster mail.

Blockchain is the next step in this sequence. Not because it makes transactions faster (it usually doesn’t). But because it creates a new kind of coordination substrate: one where the rules are set by participants rather than by platform owners, where trust comes from cryptographic verification rather than institutional authority, and where the infrastructure itself is a shared resource rather than a private asset.

The problem with the current model

Right now, the most powerful coordination infrastructure in human history is owned by a handful of companies. Facebook coordinates social interaction for 2 billion people. Google coordinates information access for most of the planet. Amazon coordinates commerce. Apple and Google coordinate the distribution of software through their app stores.

These are extraordinary coordination achievements. They’re also dangerous concentrations of power that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. The people who set the rules of these networks — what content is allowed, who can participate, how data is used, how value is distributed — are accountable to shareholders, not to participants.

This isn’t a hypothetical concern. We’ve seen platforms manipulate news feeds to influence emotions. We’ve seen data harvested and weaponized for political manipulation. We’ve seen entire communities deplatformed overnight. The rules of our most important coordination systems can change without notice, without consent, and without recourse.

Decentralized technology as an alternative

Decentralized networks offer a structurally different model. Instead of a company owning the infrastructure and setting the rules, the infrastructure is shared and the rules are encoded in protocols that participants can verify, fork, or exit.

This matters not because decentralization is inherently good — it’s a design property, not a moral virtue — but because it addresses a specific failure mode: the concentration of governance power in entities whose incentives diverge from participants’ interests over time.

Every coordination system starts aligned. The early platform is desperate for users and builds things users love. But as the platform matures and its incentives shift toward profit extraction, the interests of the platform and its participants diverge. Decentralized systems aren’t immune to misaligned incentives, but they give participants structural recourse: the ability to fork the protocol, exit with their data, or propose governance changes.

The chaos and the conviction

I won’t pretend the space isn’t chaotic. “Decentra-mania” is real. There’s too much money chasing too few real applications. The rhetoric often outpaces the technology by years. Scams are rampant. The gap between the vision (reshape human coordination) and the current reality (mostly speculation and slow databases) is enormous.

And yet.

The core thesis — that coordination infrastructure should be a shared resource governed by its participants — is one of the most important ideas I’ve encountered. It doesn’t require believing that every blockchain project will succeed, or that decentralization is always the right answer, or that the current implementations are anywhere near ready.

It just requires believing that the problem is real (centralized coordination infrastructure creates dangerous power asymmetries) and that the direction is right (shared, participant-governed infrastructure is a better long-term design).

I believe both of those things. That’s why I’m here.

What I’ll be working on

At Consensys, I’m focused on how people interact with decentralized systems. The technology is promising but the user experience is, to put it charitably, not. If decentralized coordination tools are going to matter beyond the crypto-native community, they need to be usable by regular people — not just people willing to manage private keys and navigate gas fees.

More specifically, I’m drawn to identity and data. Who you are and what’s known about you is the foundation of every coordination system. Getting that right in a decentralized context — giving people control over their own identity and data while making it useful and composable — feels like one of the highest-leverage problems to work on.

That’s vague, and it’s vague because the work of figuring out what to build is still underway. I’d rather be honest about the uncertainty than perform false confidence. The thesis is clear. The specifics are being discovered.

This is going to be a long road, full of setbacks and hype cycles and projects that don’t work. I’m optimistic anyway — not because the technology is ready, but because the problem it addresses is real, the people working on it are serious, and the alternative (hoping centralized platforms will self-regulate) isn’t a plan.