Jimmy Song and Joe Lubin Bets on The Future of Dapps

By Prashant Jha

Jimmy Song, the Bitcoin evangelist, and ConsenSYS founder Joe Lubin finally materialized on a bet for the future of decentralized applications (DApps) to decide the winner. The two crypto giants came together during the Consensus 2019 meeting where the CoinDesk mediator put both of them in agreement with the terms of the bet.

The Terms of The Bet

As per the agreement of both Lubin and Song, the terms of the bet says that if Ethereum blockchain can manage to get 15 Dapps with 10,000 active daily users and 100,000 active monthly users for a period of 6 months with the deadline being May 23rd, 2023, then Jimmy Song would send  69.74 BTC to Lubin. If the required conditions are not met before May 23rd, 2023, then Lubin needs to pay 810.8 ETH to Jimmy Song.

Now, the obvious question is the difference of token price, while BTC is currently trading over $8,000, ETH with all the pump has managed a price of $256 (at the time of writing). However, the terms of the bet took the referential price of both the tokens, where the average amount in fiat for the cryptocurrencies was around 500,000 to 600,000 dollar. Neither Lubin nor Song wanted to renegotiate the set amounts.

In order to make the bet more transparent, the amount from both sides will be held in an escrow, however, the identity of the escrow account holder was not made public at the time of finalizing the terms of the bet, since this anonymous person had not yet consulted on their willingness to fulfill this role.

The bet has been in the news for quite some time now, however, it never got completely fulfilled due to the communication gap between the two. Lubin has mentioned earlier that the bet was a bigger priority for Song, but he never backed down from the bet either. The delays occurred due to the uncertainties in the terms of the bet, like who can be considered as an active user or what makes a Dapp successful.

While Song wanted to define an active user as someone who has paid for using the services of the Dapp, but Song believed that it was an unfair criterion, as there many application today which are free to use for the masses, and only a few specific services might cost some money. Finally, they arrived at an agreement that the user does not necessarily have to carry out a transaction on the application to be called an active user.

The main reason for the bet is Song, who does not believe that a Dapp has to be on a blockchain, and Dapp can fair much better with a centralized database. This is the reason he thinks that the current trend of decentralized Dapps will disappear.