In the summer of 2016, a group of central bankers from the American Federal Reserve left their Wall Street branch office, crossed the East River and headed to Bushwick. Their destination was a graffiti-covered warehouse on Bogart Street, home to a small company called ConsenSys.
Joseph “Joe” Lubin, a Canadian programmer in his mid-fifties and founder of the financial software-maker, waited as they walked down the street to a scrappy front door festooned in stickers. The besuited bankers looked out of place in Brooklyn. Lubin wondered if ConsenSys should be worried about them.
The Fed officials were there to fact-find. ConsenSys was quickly becoming influential in the world of cryptocurrency, and Lubin was turning his company into the world’s first crypto conglomerate, a network of for-profit projects tied into bitcoin’s biggest rival, ethereum.