Ethan Buchman talks with his hands, and the range of subjects he wants to talk about is vast.
He wants to talk about Alexander the Great, cell biology and the similarities between neuroscience and religion. He wants to talk about ecological sustainability, community sovereignty and how to structure a company so it respects and rewards its workers. Surveillance capitalism, the history of computer science, the laws of thermodynamics: all come up over the course of an hour at a coffee shop in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, over an oat milk cappuccino (and prior to the most recent set of COVID-19 restrictions).
The Cosmos ecosystem, a blockchain protocol that Buchman co-founded, is worth US$125 billion, and its Atom token has increased in price to a market capitalization of US$10.1 billion during a month that wiped out over US$700 billion from the cryptocurrency market, or more than one-third of its value. But he doesn’t want to talk about that.
