The Man Behind ERC20 Wants to Make Web3 Human with LUKSO

In the world of blockchain, few names stand out as prominently as Fabian Vogelsteller. Known for his groundbreaking work on the ERC20 standard and his role in developing Ethereum’s early tools, Vogelsteller has now turned his attention to a new frontier: decentralized identity. In this exclusive interview, he shares his journey from the early days of Ethereum to founding LUKSO, a blockchain platform designed to bring decentralization to the masses. Discover how LUKSO is poised to redefine identity in Web3 and why Vogelsteller believes the future of blockchain lies in social applications.

Ishan Pandey: Hi Fabian Vogelsteller, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to our “Behind the Startup” series. Please tell us about yourself and what inspired you to found LUKSO.

Fabian Vogelsteller: My journey in crypto started in 2013 when I first heard about Bitcoin and since then I have been really involved in the idea of decentralization. I followed the altcoin rise and learned about Ethereum in 2014. I got lucky enough to become part of the core Ethereum team in January 2015, 6 months before we started the Ethereum mainnet. I was the lead dApp developer, where I built the first web3 browser, called Mist. Through that I helped develop how we interact with smart contracts, build tools for developers like Web3.js, the most used JavaScript library for the first 4+ years of Ethereum and much more.

In 2015, I proposed ERC20, a standard for tokens based on a draft from Vitalik. It became the first smart contract standard and one of the most important changes to the Ethereum ecosystem, kicking off ICOs, DeFi, NFTs and now Memecoins.

We all had this vision of creating a decentralized society, where we remove the middleman and use decentralized technology as the building blocks for a new society. But funny enough the ERC20 token standard really pulled that all even stronger into tokens and trading. This was not on purpose, but was an important lesson for crypto – we always saw the idea way bigger than just tokens and trading.

In 2018, I started LUKSO, co-founded with my former partner, Marjorie Hernandez. The idea was to bring blockchain away from finance and into the hands of everyone. Really bringing crypto into the mainstream and making it the key infrastructure for everything that we use on the internet today. Anyone can benefit from decentralization: content creators, YouTubers, artists, musicians, influencers, journalists, brands and normal users at large. We all can benefit from these technologies, but with the focus on tokens everything circulated around finance. And that’s what holds the space back until today.

Ishan Pandey: In the evolving blockchain landscape, how do you define ‘identity’ within web3, and why is it such a critical component for the future of decentralized systems?

Fabian Vogelsteller: The problem with identity in Web3, is that your account is your identity, but Web3 accounts are missing the “humaness” part of identity and other fundamental features that make interacting on-chain seamless and more accessible – that’s what we’re now bringing to the space. Right now, Web3 identities are essentially a dump address, which cannot hold any information or react to anything on-chain. If we really want to make decentralized technology the foundation of future societies, then that account needs to be far more sophisticated than a single public/private key pair.

I believe crypto wallets should actually be profiles. The biggest part of the LUKSO story over the last years was to build out a new set of foundational standards called LSPs that allowed us, among other things, to create a proper decentralized identity system called Universal Profiles and from there on build the foundational building blocks for a new decentralized society.

Ishan Pandey: You authored ERC20 and introduced standards like ERC725. Can you explain how these standards have shaped the blockchain ecosystem and paved the way for identity-focused protocols like those at LUKSO?

Fabian Vogelsteller: Like I mentioned before, ERC20 was instrumental for the blockchain space. Suddenly it became super easy for people to create tokens and we got projects that before had to launch a whole network, now could simply raise money to build out their protocols. The downside of this was that the focus went strongly into DeFi, raising money and trading. Don’t get me wrong, those are very important building blocks for crypto at large, but also keeps crypto in the niche that it is today, especially when you look at the real user numbers.

Then in 2017, I proposed ERC725, the first smart contract account standard proposal for Ethereum. ERC725 is basically a smart contract that can generically do things on a blockchain, while also storing information. It later created the foundation for many of the standards that we built for LUKSO.

LUKSO in itself is a generic blockchain like Ethereum. In fact, it uses the same technology and the same consensus mechanism as Ethereum, as it is the most decentralized version of a proof-of-stake blockchain that we have today. What makes LUKSO different is these whole new smart contract standards that involve profiles, new evolved token standards and all kinds of new mechanisms that make using blockchain humanly accessible and expand the possibilities for future protocols.

You might ask, couldn’t you have done that on Ethereum? The answer is no.

The Standards discussion in the ERC space are slow and gradual, radical and potentially backwards incompatible proposals will not get any support. And most importantly: Everyone adopted ERC20, that means you won’t be able to improve those standards and how they relate to the accounts at all. It needs its own network to serve as a frontier to explore these new standards. And because we are talking about identity, it must be as decentralized as possible, hence why we chose Ethereum’s PoS.

This approach gave us a chance to really rethink standards from the ground up, but with the learning of the last 10 years of Ethereum. Something that hasn’t been done before in that way.

Ishan Pandey: Identity solutions in Web3 have often struggled with usability and adoption. How does LUKSO bridge the gap between blockchain-native users and mainstream adoption?

Fabian Vogelsteller: Here’s the tricky part. Most of the identity solutions that we have seen in the past try to solve what I call hard identity. These are things like passports, health records, and other slow changing data. Systems for these types of data are difficult to adopt, because it requires acceptance across a lot of large players and institutions. Even the DID standards struggle to get widespread adoption, and they come from the W3C.

For LUKSO, we approached it from the soft identity angle. This is the identity people use every day online—social media accounts, gaming profiles, and digital personas. These identities often start as casual but become more important over time as they gain followers, reputation, and value. So you start with something fun, and it can later become important and serve even as a foundation for hard identity.

The biggest challenge with any identity system is to define the root identity—where is the entry point to access everything about somone/thing across platforms. Today this identity is locked within different platforms that we don’t own or really control. Blockchain is the first platform that we can truly own and control things by ourselves, without trusting a third party. Hence why it’s the best foundation for a decentralized identity system.

Universal Profiles are such a system and they give you an account that lives on decentralized infrastructure first and is managed by your devices. This approach makes identity independent and through the new standards, flexible and composable. It’s important to understand that this type of identity doesn’t necessarily need to be tied to real-world credentials—it can reflect any chosen persona, whether you as an artist, gamer, company, or brand. And it also can become the foundation for not just people, but communities, DAOs, AIs, applications, and even apps. Every entity that needs history and reputation should have an on-chain identity!

For example, dApps can have profiles that store key information—open-source smart contracts, security audits, user ratings—all transparently on-chain. The same applies to businesses, creative projects, and even AI agents.

Ishan Pandey: LUKSO aims to integrate digital identity with creative industries like fashion and art. What unique challenges and opportunities do you see in applying blockchain identity solutions in these sectors?

Fabian Vogelsteller: We initially focused our examples on fashion and art to showcase blockchain’s potential beyond finance. Keep in mind that it was in 2019 when we wrote our whitepaper “Blueprint for the New Creative Economies”, even one year before NFTs became largely popular. But LUKSO takes Ethereum to the next level. It’s a very generic decentralized infrastructure. And like I described above, the purpose of identity touches literally every aspect of our lives.

So you can see LUKSO as the Ethereum with new standards, where we can create a new form of Web3 that includes users all across the web.

You don’t have to have to be interested in the financial aspect of blockchain, but you can use it as the tool to create your first ever fully self owned accounts that only you control. And that overtime those might become the most important accounts that you have online, as they not only will be able to do things you do in web2, but also give you the power of web3.

We created a platform called universaleverything.io, which serves as a frontend to browse Universal Profiles and interact with them through what we call “TheGrid”. The grid is simply a decentralized way to run Mini-Apps under your profile, that can know about the profile they are hosted under. As mini-apps can be anything, from any website, to a dApp running a dex, it combines web2 with the things you can do in web3, which opens up a huge space of possibilities which is pretty much endless. And because visitors to your profile can connect to these Mini-Apps with a single click, we can’t even yet imagine all the things that people will be doing and building around them.

Ishan Pandey: As digital identity moves on-chain, there will likely be regulatory scrutiny. How does LUKSO balance decentralization with compliance and privacy concerns?

Fabian Vogelsteller: That’s a great question. LUKSO’s Universal Profiles are inherently public in their first form because they are on-chain identities. This is what ensures they are truly owned by the user. That said, privacy can absolutely be built on top of this technology. There are many ways to integrate privacy protocols, and this is something that will be explored over time. Right now, Universal Profiles should be treated as public—your profile and transactions are visible to everyone, just like any account on a public blockchain today.

However, being identifiable doesn’t necessarily mean being personally identified. A Universal Profile allows you to create a self-defined persona, distinct from your real-world identity. As adoption grows, there will naturally be demand for privacy features—allowing users to attach information to their profiles that isn’t publicly visible. The underlying architecture is designed to accommodate these additions in the future.

Public identities have shaped the internet as we know it. Social platforms like Facebook made the internet social, and they did so through public profiles. Regarding regulations like GDPR, this is an open question for the entire blockchain space. Since blockchains are distributed systems, transactions are shared across the network, making data persistence a fundamental feature. However, developments in blockchain pruning could allow history to remain verifiable while also being “forgotten” over time—creating a potential form of erasure.

But in reality, the internet never truly forgets. Even if we can ask centralized platforms to remove data, anything published online tends to persist. This brings us back to the importance of protocols built on top of this technology—some will enable privacy, while others will remain fully public.

Ishan Pandey: Security and privacy are paramount for any identity protocol. How does LUKSO balance the need for robust security with the necessity for user-friendly, accessible identity solutions?

Fabian Vogelsteller: And this is why it took 5 years to develop these standards. We made over 7 audits on the core standard implementations and built a browser extension, mobile apps and a transaction-relay infrastructure and this on a completely new tech stack.

And as you can imagine, when you have to rethink everything, you’re not just expanding on what MetaMask has been doing, you’re really building on a whole new level of everything.

With such a new foundation, we can expand usability and finally make Web3 fully accessible to a much larger audience.

All of this doesn’t just depend on us. Everyone can build and expand these profiles. They are so open and generic that anyone can extend them.

For example, someone could create a social recovery protocol, integrating platforms like Authy or Google Cloud as backups. Or develop a completely new way controlling the profile, like with a key manager ready for enterprises. You could even place a Gnosis Safe in front of a Universal Profile and get multi-sig functionality, or use a Governor contract to turn it into a DAO.

There are endless possibilities because this system is so fundamentally flexible. And that’s what excites me—seeing how people will expand and evolve it in ways we haven’t even imagined yet.

Ishan Pandey: How does LUKSO’s identity and token standards integrate with existing Ethereum-based protocols, and what are the challenges of achieving widespread interoperability?

Fabian Vogelsteller: In essence, Universal Profiles function similarly to existing Ethereum wallets. When developing for Universal Profiles, the experience is no different than building for MetaMask or any other Ethereum-based wallet. The key difference is that users gain a more advanced account, with features like:

• Information storage – add profile data, or arbitrary smart contract readable information to your account
• Permissions – restricting certain actions per device
• Multi-device access – using the same account across multiple devices, each one using their own private key
• Application authorization – allowing even dApps to act on your behalf
• Reactability – tokens and protocols can inform your account, and users can automate what happens

And yes, we built Universal Profiles with chain abstraction in mind. This means they are designed to be deployable on multiple chains at the same address. While our current interfaces do not yet support this, this will be done over time.

For example, a Universal Profile can originate on LUKSO but later interact with protocols on other networks where it has been made available. Similarly, if you’re deploying a protocol on LUKSO, you don’t need to change anything—LUKSO is fully Ethereum-compatible, and Universal Profiles can interact seamlessly with any protocol.

But we didn’t just build an identity system—we also evolved the token standards to ensure that assets and profiles work together in a more dynamic way. For example, when a token is sent to a Universal Profile, that profile can control how it interacts with assets (block certain tokens, reroute them automatically, etc.), automate interactions (e.g., sending an NFT in response to a decentralized follow request) and lots more.

These capabilities go beyond what’s possible on existing blockchains because other networks are locked into standards like ERC20, which were created at a time when we had no understanding of how blockchain protocols would evolve.

You can see LUKSO as a new frontier. For developers, this means that building on LUKSO offers entirely new possibilities, where you can build apps and protocols that allow for automations on user accounts, everyone comes with a profile and tokens and NFTs are a lot more flexible.

And this is not a blank ecosystem, there are already over 29k Universal Profiles and 100s of tokens and NFTs, all using these new standards.

Ishan Pandey: Having been at the forefront of Ethereum’s growth, what excites you most about the next phase of blockchain technology?

Fabian Vogelsteller: What excites me most is that the next phase of blockchain will be all about social. It’s about bringing real, everyday users into the space—moving beyond the niche focus on finance and gambling and making decentralized technology a part of our global society. That has been my vision since my time at the Ethereum Foundation. But to make this become a reality, I believe we need a blank slate and an entirely new foundation.

We needed the new standards to enable true decentralization at scale.

Hence why we spent the last six years developing those standards, ensuring we finally have the infrastructure needed to bring decentralization to the rest of the world.

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