Bankless - Will MetaMask Drop a Token? Breaking Down the Biggest Wallet Merge Ever

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

MetaMask and MyCrypto are teaming up to build the ultimate crypto wallet. Revamping efforts on security, user experience, as well as features & integrations, this is a massive moment in the world of non-custodial crypto wallets. As the passport to Web3, improving and innovating the crypto wallet is increasingly vital as the entire industry continues to scale outwards. Building a secure and intuitive flow for asset management is do-or-die for the crypto space. With Dan Finlay from Consensys and Taylor Monahan from MyCrypto, we're exploring the implications of this monumental merger and what it means for the broader crypto user experience. ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:         https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot  🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:00 The MetaMask MyCrypto Merger 13:57 Power & Responsibility 17:58 What Happens Next? 24:08 By the Numbers 25:57 What is a Crypto Wallet? 32:33 The Passport to the Metaverse 35:44 More Merger Details 43:30 What's After Swaps? 47:58 Aggregators and Bridges 52:44 The Layer 2 Metamask 57:03 Polynya's Social Recovery Question 1:02:58 Vitalik's Light Client Question 1:06:00 Wen $MASK Token? 1:11:14 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Dan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/danfinlay?s=20  Taylor on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tayvano_?s=20  The Announcement: https://medium.com/metamask/welcoming-mycrypto-to-metamask-8ee46e2ae740  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another State of the Nation episode where we talk about something big that is happening in crypto this week. The news is big. This is the biggest wallet merge ever, I think. I'm calling it that. As far as we're aware, this is the biggest one ever. This is between Metamask and My Crypto. David, what are we talking about today? Yeah, everyone uses Metamask. How can you not know what Metamask is? So anytime something happens to Metamask, it's a really, really big deal. And the veterans of the crypto industry might also remember when they were loading up their wallets into my crypto to participate in like ICO drops or any other crazy shenanigans that that we did during that era. And so we have two veterans of wallet designers. We have Dan Finley and Taylor Monaghan coming to tell us all about what is perhaps the biggest merger in wallet history.

And so that is a story in of itself. and everyone kind of wants to take a peek behind the scenes of MetaMask and what they are up to, which is exactly what we are going to be doing today on today's state of the nation. Yeah, it's going to be awesome. These two wallets and user interfaces are what got me into the Ethereum space, what got me into crypto. So I'm really excited for this merger. The coming together.

I don't know if it's going to be called CryptoMask, MetaCrypto, or My CryptoMask. We'll have to ask our guest in a minute. And if you have a question, also let us know what you want us to ask in the YouTube comments. David and I monitor those and we ask questions. Guys, a few housekeeping items before we begin. The first is we got to let you know about the permissionless conference. That is a conference that I am attending. David is attending.

We think this is going to be the biggest defy conference of the year, probably ever, super excited about the agenda we have planned. Get your tickets is all I can say. Anything you want to add to that, David? I'm absolutely stoked for this conference. The content calendar is coming together very, very nicely. the bank lists and beers will be a thing. And so perhaps Ryan and I have this chariots of fire running across the moment stage at his brewery.

I don't know. We're going to meet for the first time. We're going to meet for the first time. Maybe you guys want to attend for that. There might be a po-app. But yeah, you got to come. You got to come to the event. Yeah, go check that out, guys.

We'll include a link in the show notes. Also, our friends at Zirion, while we're on the topic of wallets and Metamask and getting into D-Fi, the gateway to D-Fi, want to talk a little bit about Zirion. They are friends and sponsors, and you might use them on the daily. If you don't, you should. I use them on a daily basis. If you connect your wallet to it, you'll notice some incredible new feature ads. One is this? This is not my wallet, by the way.

But you could click here on all networks. You could see all of the different networks your assets reside on. So this is Ethereum. This is optimism. So layer 2s, we've got Avalanche, other EVM chains. They're adding more all of the time. Also, this nifty. little feature. Bridging. We are in the midst of the great migration from Ethereum mainnet to

layer twos. Okay. And if you want to bridge your tokens, Xeron has a feature for that where you can just bridge from Ethereum to Polygon or look, finance, better yet, optimism, arbitram, some other chains as well. You can make that happen at Xerion. We'll include a link in the show notes so you can go check that out. Connect to your wallet today. Completely bankless, by the way. No Bank has control of your assets when you're using Xeron. It's just you, your private keys and the Xeron user interface. The way we like it. That's the way we like it, right, David?

Absolutely. I wouldn't have it any other way. Wouldn't have it any other way. All right, guys, we're going to be back in just a few minutes. Oh, no, no. Dude, I got to ask you the question. Yeah, you just forgot. Yeah, this is a good one.

What's the state of the nation today, David? Ryan, this is the state of the nation is alliterating. Metamask my crypto merger. So Ryan, today on the state of the nation, we are alliterating. We don't really have to unpack that one too much. All right. There might be some depth there that David uncovers in like a 10,000 word piece that he publishes on bank lists later on. Or maybe there's no depth.

Maybe it's just alliteration. That's what we're doing this week, right? We're alliterating. Stay tuned to find out. Guys, we will be back in just a moment with Taylor and Dan talking about this epic merger. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the open, and transparency of Defi. SlingShaw aggregates liquidity from all of defy in order to find the best

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transactions for your users, visit developer.offchainlabs.com to get started building your application on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps or NFT projects building on Arbitrum. Many of your favorite apps are already live, with many more coming over soon. You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.com. And you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum.com using bridge.orgatrum.com. In order to experience defy and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, and friction-free. All right, Bankless Nation. we are back to discuss the Metamask My Crypto merger, the Triple M. Here we got Dan Finley, who has been building Metamask at consensus for like six years now,

and also taught me everything I needed to know about Merkel Trees in his DevCon, Zero talk, which I think happened in Seattle, which burned into his brain. That's not all that Merkel Trees can do. And we also have Taylor Monaghan, who is the founder and CEO of My Crypto, which started being everyone's first wallet during the ICO era of Ethereum, an extremely challenging time to be a wallet operator. And Taylor has taken these veteran lessons all the way through and through Ethereum's history to where we are now today, which is a merger between Metamask and My Crypto.

So Dan, Taylor, welcome to Bankless, and congratulations on the merge, guys. Yeah, thanks so much. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, it has been a really, really long time coming. excited to finally get to talk about this and see what's up next for us. Wait, that's some alpha. So how long have you guys been talking? Like how long you said this is a long time coming? Oh, well, he's part of the plan or is this?

Oh, I meant it in two senses. I meant both like we've been like kind of building wallets alongside each other for so long that it almost just feels like it's kind of built up to this. And then also, yeah, we've been like, you know, like tossing around the idea. of what this could possibly turn into for, yeah, I don't know, like, with like six months or something. Like, it's like, you know, figuring out if we could conceive of it working was like, I think, the most important part.

Yeah, we didn't talk to anyone else about it until we were like somewhat confident in the success of it. And particularly for like the teams, as I'm sure most people are aware, like the hardest thing about doing emerge is the people and bringing them together. And so that was sort of our focus. And I do remember, for timeline's sake, at one point I was like, okay, once we get through EIP 1559, then we can really talk about this. So that's how long it's been. You know, one other thing that both of your solutions, both your projects have in common is you like the customer support.

The front end helped us customer support for crypto. Which I'm sorry for. Yes, and Taylor, I know my crypto then called my Ether Wallet was so key during like 2017 ICO. I mean, it's what everyone used, what I used. I remember reading like basically you're doing help desk stuff on Reddit forms for people. Like it was an incredible time. And then Metamask, Dan, you know, no different. If there's an issue with my transaction didn't go through, block spaces, you know, gas fees are too expensive.

Where'd my money go? Anything in the front end. Yeah, it looks like Dan is shuddering, like just thinking about this. Yeah, yeah. We have some very shared trauma. Okay, so you've got some shared trauma. Is that a unifying thing being the help desk, the front customer support of Ethereum of crypto?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I would put it like, like when you go through something like that together, it's like you're bonded for life. And the people that were sort of on the front lines in 2017. Like those are still some of my best friends to this day. Like the people like that we, you know, the fissures and the scammers came out of nowhere. That group of people that all like stood together trying to solve this problem and big stuff, we're still all very close.

And like in particular me and Dan, just because we're also trying to run a wallet thing and build the future of everything and keep people safe, you know, you just, you have that shared experience in that, I don't know, loneliness. Like, no one understands me, but we understand each other. It's fantastic. I feel like it transforms you when you go through it because, like, it teaches you so much about what's, what this ecosystem is and what it's made of. And like, when you're helping these people, like, there's like so many different people

with so many different, you know, you thought you just taught some people at some hackathon. And then suddenly, you know, it's a, you know, grandma in Kansas or, you know, it's like, you you know, like an artist in Lagos or, you know, and you're just like, you're just like, oh, okay, how did you get into it? You know, what's your problem or like, what's your, you know, where are you at in this journey and like understanding all the different ways people can, can kind of like mess up and lose their money or something. I think it like builds up like this like reverence.

Like, like it was it was all fun building in like 2016. 2016, it was like, yeah, add some ads and appi. Add some features we have like. Changes in the world, baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was fun. And what's funny is like, you know, there's like some APIs that we made that are like, they were like kind of half baked.

Those are, those are 2016 APIs. Like, you know, it was easy going times. You know, the bar was a little bit lower. But, but man, yeah, like once it gets real, once you like have, you know, there's like a level where people like, you realize like for some people, this is their whole life, you know, and, you know, like, I mean, And I don't, I'm not advising people put their whole life savings into crypto if they don't understand it.

But some people are doing that, you know, and you got to, if you're a wallet, you should be building as if people are doing that. And there's just this reverence for it for the process and for like, you know, the experience and like what it means to have this like digital asset manager that, that I think, I think that we have a shared kind of reverence for a certain respect for like where the bar is at to keep users safe. And yeah, so it's, it's kind of easy. I find that we like agree about a lot of product principle decisions. Like when we're talking about pretty much any, you know, little feature like someone's like, you know, oh, you know, you should, it'd be really nice if you were, you know, whatever. And then like

we tend to consistently, you know, like, I don't know, like auto detecting NFTs is like one of those things where it's like it's really easy to want that as a user. The failure modes, though, are not obvious to everyone. But for somebody who's like seen thousands and thousands of people get fished in a million different ways, you know, like, yeah, like we, I think we just have like an eye for the ways that it's just like, oh, oh, just constantly seeing things go wrong. And it's a rare kind of insight. And I, I've so, so respect how much of it Taylor's got. And she shares it liberally too. Like, like, I'm definitely quieter on Twitter, but, you know, she makes it very obvious and tries to help other people see it that, you know.

I try. Yeah, I try. I yell at people and hope that they're listening to me. So I actually want to dive into that because you guys, Dan, you talked about the alignment between the building the ethos of both of your guys' wallets. And so I want to understand what that is. What is the thing that both Metamask and My Crypto are super aligned on? And how is that going to guide the product moving forward?

Yeah, I think that for the, I think both me and Dan have sort of undergone a, I don't know, a transformation and evolution from like the very early days to where we are today. And I think a lot of other people will get there eventually. But it's a, the wallet is like probably the most key piece of, of infrastructure, a product in the entire space. for me, like I was like, I was like, yeah, just build a paper wallet generator. Yay. Okay, it's just this thing that allows you to sign things. Like, whatever. That was sort of my first, like the first couple years of building. That's what it was like. And then in 2017, it turned into like, oh, okay, like the wallet has the ability to protect, but everyone else is sort of like driving people into the ecosystem, right? Like everyone else is promoting their ICOs, bringing people in. And the wallet is like the sort of the last stop where, you know, we have this opportunity to save users.

And today I realize it's like the wallet is not only the last stop or like the last trusted space or the one place where we could save a user from like interacting with a scam or or doing something else. But it also sort of has this responsibility of giving people the power to interact with these things. and because of that, the wallet also has like the ability to abuse that power, right? And that's why I think it's really, really important that the people who are building wallets and the teams and people who are using wallets all sort of understand just how integral it is that, you know, things are built in the correct way, that the focus remains on empowering the user and giving them choice, that it does not, you know, we don't go into. to like censoring transactions or babysitting. Like we actually, we really need to educate and empower people. If there's any chance that we're going to build like a different world, let alone a better world.

And Dan understands this. Like he's had some blogs out recently where like his response to the moxie article was when I was like, he gets it. That's what's in my head that I haven't had a chance to like get out into words yet. And yeah, I think that the next couple of years I think are going to be. increasingly important as well because, again, you know, whenever the market cycle cycle, it's, there's like this flood of users who don't really understand what's happening. They're really, really excited for the potential.

And it's during that, the sort of the down periods where people actually understand, like, the values and understand why this is important. And I think that, yeah, next couple years are going to be fun ones. This is exactly what you said. This entire industry is completely pinned on top of. private keys. Private keys are just the thing that unlocks everything. First, it unlocks people like being able to hold crypto, but it really does so much more than that, right? And I think people are starting to get an idea of what that means with NFTs, right? Where, you know, these NFTs are

starting to become tools of identity, but also the trustless verification of signing private keys can unlock so many new superpowers, which means that all of the superpowers that people are able to access because of private keys all resides inside of the wallet that they choose to use. use, which gives wallet designers an immense amount of responsibility for how they choose to design their systems. And so, well, I think maybe people coming in to this industry who are brand new, are like, oh, yeah, just give me the best wallet ever. They don't understand the magnitude of the question that they just asked or the request

that they're making. So a question to you guys is now that you guys have merged, what is in store? Like, what comes next? What happens to my crypto? what happens to Metamask wallet? And is this changing the trajectory of Metamask in any particular way? You want to do it, Taylor? I think it's going to, I mean, we're in the process of merging.

So we're like, our teams are like getting acquainted, getting to know each other, finding their place. You know, we're not sunsetsing the My Cryptoad products because they're like total bastions of stability for a lot of people who need like, you know, that, that a derivative. path that nobody else uses with that, you know, while it doesn't support it otherwise, or, you know, or just like a million of the other features it provides. But, yeah, there's a lot of things that become possible. I mean, kind of to tie in the last topic,

it's like being that last bastion of trust for a person when they're interacting with stuff. Like, I sometimes think of us as like, we're like your digital lawyer, like, oh, this is what, this is what that'll mean, you know? And the thing is that the amount of knowledge your ideal lawyer would have, is like boundless, you know. So being able to have this expertise, like, you know,

we've now got twice as many experts on 1559. You know, we've got twice as many experts on hardware wallets now, you know, and now we've got experts on maintaining a desktop app. So that's, you know, a little bit of a trajectory shifter for sure. Yeah, yeah, what other ones are jumping out of you? God. I don't know. It's tough because everyone's asking us what we're doing at the products. And we've been so focused on just making sure that the teams are going to be aligned and like that every individual has like a place. And like they have they're empowered to like continue,

you know, creating value and more value and that kind of stuff. So on the product end, it's kind of like, it just hasn't been our focus. But I think there's some obvious sort of next or where we're coming. One is I think that the potential for a desktop application with Madamas is an obvious one. We've been working on, like we have our existing desktop app, but we've also been working on this new sort of very lightweight signer. That's just like the core, I guess the core of a lot. And we can build that out. And that acts more similar to how MetaMask acts, where you basically have like a website or a DAB that is. is where you're getting the information that you need

and you're constructing the transaction. And then the desktop applet, I guess, sign our thing that we're building. That's just that final piece. And so its responsibility is sort of just the, I guess, the last mile, right, where you sign it and you want to know what you're signing. And the desktop just, it enables a lot of, I guess,

functionality that the browser does it. The other thing is, you know, MetaMask has a list a mile long of things that we can improve upon, things that can be cleaned up. Some of it is like indirect response to users and support tickets and that kind of stuff. Some of it is the mile long list of Twitter commentary that floods in literally every single day. And I think it's really important that we, you know, as the team is scaling up, the users are just like streaming through the front door, we get better at prioritizing, like, how all of these different desires fit into both the short-term plan and the long-term plan, right? Because we have to balance the bugs and the security issues or the privacy issues

with, you know, the really influential guy on Twitter who decided that today was the day where he was going to unleash the torrent of complaints on to Dan. And yeah, I think working together and all of these things. It's like, it's not just like new fancy things. It's also just really, really improving what we already have. What about the branding? What's happening to the my crypto branding? Is my crypto turning into MetaMask? Or are we keeping the My Crypto branding? What's going on there? I honestly assumed that My Crypto, the My Crypto brand would like be slowly phased out in favor of MetaMask. But you can't tweet the word MetaMask right now without being like just having a pile of reply bots on you.

Oh my God. Yeah. So for the listeners, I tweeted out like the link to this live stream via Twitter. And like instantaneously seven bots came and said, hey, like, do you need metamass support? Email this scam email or fill out the scam.

You'd scam. Yeah. Which obviously is requesting for private keys. Yeah. That must be a mess. Yeah. So we're keeping the My Crypto brand alive for now because we can still meet. I think we can.

reclaim. I, you know, I mean, part of this is like a symptom of how Twitter works, where it's just like really easy to impersonate anyone. But, you know, we've got some ideas for how we can continue to combat the fissures. I don't want to like, you know, let the fissures get a head start on, on our countermeasures. But it is a cat and mouse game. And, you know, also, you know, we're getting some excellent security thinkers at my crypto that'll help us build out better, you know, response and defensive capabilities for our users. So I'm stoked about that too. Also, though, you know, just Taylor, since you bring up, like, I don't know, like, is the

brand thrash? Like, or is it the best PR? It's like, it's the word you can't say. I don't know. I'm undecided on this. It's like, but yeah, it's almost, it's almost become a joke. And it's almost become like an inoculation where like everybody knows. They're like, oh, you said the word.

And like, if you're in on that joke, then you're going to. you're kind of like mentally inoculated against the tactic. And so I think there's something healthy going on in the in the community there. Well, it's crazy. It's like so you guys have been at this for six years, which is like an absolute, like you're the adults of the space. Okay. A lot of people coming in like myself included, you know, a little bit, are still toddlers, you know, and you guys are sort of the adults of the space. And Metamask and my crypto as well, they're no longer kind of, you know, can't be niche. products, right? We're talking about some serious daily active users. And Dan, I was curious,

like, what are the latest MetaMask daily active users or maybe like monthly active users? I know we're in the million. I don't know the daily's offhand. Tell me the month. Oh, actually, I think so, sorry, we crossed the big number and we didn't like celebrate it, but we crossed the 30 million. So we're like 32 million now. Oh, wow. I didn't know there's a audience has mics. Yeah, there's a there's a total. There's an audience. to the left and David that's just out of camera you can't see yeah they watch every show like talking plants yeah and then daily active i think we're we're like eight or nine uh million something like that 30 million okay nine million dailies 30 million monthly um that that's absolutely insane growth

and and so like as we as we turn uh and talk a little bit about you know the future of wallets i also just want to get us grounded in in terms of your philosophy of how you think of a wallet and what you build next, right? And I'm wondering if there's some analogies from the past that we use here, uh, or what your analogy might be Dan and Taylor, right? So like, because there's kind of a question of is metamask going to turn into an ecosystem. What is it going to be? Is it going to be sort of a, is it like a browser? Are you like, is Metamask? Is it like internet explore? Is it an operating system? Is this like Linux or Windows? Okay. So like, what is your analogy for?

for this thing or is it a totally separate category, something new. We know it is like Netscape in that it's the first place you send your friends, you get in crypto, like you go to Coinbase, whatever, and then you want to do real crypto stuff, you go get a MetaMask wallet. So like what's the analogy from your perspective? Maybe start with Dan. Okay. So I think that what we are is something like a distributed user agent. So user agent is the, the, the, the word that you use for like when a computer is trusted to act on your behalf. So your operating system, you know, you plug in a USB thing. You're trusting the computer, the operating system to keep you safe from whatever you just plugged in.

Hopefully it's good at that. The truth is, you know, most operating systems you install an app that kind of owns you, right? So they're kind of poor user agents. They're working on it, though. Browsers are another user agent. Like it's right there in the HTTP headers is like, you know, it's like user agent string, Mozilla, you know. So browsers are keeping you safe from things that you don't trust. But both of those are these kinds of local user agents where you've got some stuff locally

on your machine right here and it's controlling the permissions. Now browser, you're loading some remote content and you know, you're beaming some info back and forth. So you're getting more distributed. But then once we added crypto in, now we've got this kind of agency, this kind of like user decision making and computer power that is. is not on your computer anymore, and it's not on any one person's computer. So it's not suitable for a password. And so you need to be able to make these, you need a process on your computer,

it's able to help you make informed decisions for a distributed network. Yeah, basically that. So it's kind of just like an operating system kernel or something. It's like a permissions manager. And, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, you think about it first as a wallet, so you're like, it's financial, but I think we've already seen it's way bigger than just finance. It's like people are inventing new. I mean, even if you're just talking about finance, people are inventing new derivatives all the time. But then they're also like voting on stuff.

And then they're also like selling art. And then they're like, you know, making, you know, Dow is based on it. It's like so the metaphor of just money doesn't actually hold up for it at all. It's way bigger than that. It's way more general. So it's this kind of distributed authority. Dan, I kind of feel like you're saying Netscape. Like, I'm going to still use that one.

Like, it's like, I mean, it is also, it's similar. Yeah. It's similar. One difference is that we don't provide the window, right? So ideally your wallet can let you interact with applications from any host. So, you know, you could, you know, you could sign into a native desktop app using Wallet Connect today, right? And you can, you can sign in on a, yeah, to a website via mobile. I think it's just a matter of time before we're doing like NFC login and stuff like that.

I think the operating system is bigger than a window. It's like literally just like this fabric of digital agreements between us. So kind of, but it's like the permissions part of Netscape kind of and then just blow that out between all possible ways of interacting with other software. I see. What do you think, Taylor? What would you add to that? Yeah, I think that the reason it's really hard to like come up with a really sort of a one-to-one analysis. is that one, you know, the difference between the operating system and the browser historically

is there isn't this like financial layer to it and money does change things. The reason that like there are so many scammers and so many people trying to steal your crypto is that it's money, like crypto's money. And so that adds like a whole new layer. And then the biggest, I guess, realization that people, are probably starting to understand more tangibly today with NFTs and the like is what the sort of the things that we're interacting with, they are anything. Like it's infinite, right? So similar to how like, I guess the browser can access this content or load up this content and that content

can be anything. The, you know, what Metamask is interacting with can also be anything. However, it's much more, it's not just content, it's much more personal. So, you know, you could be in the same way that right now, like you go and you visit a DAP and you send some, you send some ETH somewhere or you put it over a bridge or you lend it out or whatever it is. You're not only like giving this thing control over your finances. it's also, you know, with NFTs, it's not literally money. It's these, anything from like a JPEG or a collectible or a store value or whatever you want to say. But it could also be like your identity. It could be like your relationships or your personal sort of like network, right?

You could be like sharing little nuggets or the entire sort of your entire social graph. with the network access, like, you know, that could or could not be, like, mapped to the in real life reality that we live in. There's things that are just, like, fundamental to our personal being. And so I think when we visit a website, it's a much more passive experience in general. Yes, like, you can log in and, yes, you can, like, put your name in there and stuff. but the wallet is ultimately going to be a thing where when you sign a transaction, you're giving some piece of yourself, right? Whether that's a piece of your financial identity or a piece of your literal finances

all the way to like, yeah, your work identity, your gamer tag, like, you know, or your level on that game. And I think that it's really important for people to understand that what exactly this stuff is that you're giving permission or the wallet is controlling the permission to or whatever you want to say. Whatever that stuff is, is like whatever people dream up. It could be literally anything. And that's a really mind-boggling concept to realize as a wallet builder. It is super mind-boggling.

And the stakes are so much higher. It's almost like as we transition, as humanity transitions into this digital future in the metaverse, right? your eth address almost becomes like your home address. And like when you're signing things, you're like inviting someone to come into your home. Like that's how personal this space sort of is, only it's in the digital world. Right. And that's what I think like the wallet as like this analogy to this like thing that's in your pocket that has your like your cash in it, has your credit cards in it, maybe it has like

your library card in it. I think it's a good first analogy because it is like giving this. access to these things. But it really, I like your house analogy because that's what it is, right? It's like everything that you, that you are, that you experience, that you have, that you own, that you've borrowed, tokens that represent something that you've borrowed on a different chain, you know, like just, yeah, it's, it's a lot. The analogy that that comes to my mind is a Harry Potter horrocks. Taylor, you said that you when you signed something, like you give away a piece of yourself.

Well, usually we're interacting with contracts that we trust, right? Like, I'm okay with me giving a little, giving access to my soul to like Uniswap or something. Like, I'll let Uniswap trade my tokens when I press the buttons. But everyone needs to be cognizant that when, like, they sign a message, that they're, or they're giving some approval to something, somehow, somewhere, that approval is to do whatever you're allowing it to do to your wallet, which could be anything, right?

So it's, it's like, you know, it's signing away a little bit of your, saying like, I trust you with this. Please don't scam me. Have you guys ever considered calling the proof transaction soul bonding? On soul? Yeah. Do you want to bond your soul to do this one? I mean, I like having playful language in there.

And it'd be cool if we allowed like them so that people could like subscribe to like the playful language that appealed to them. You know, because like like let's say if there's a transaction where we're not able to make it coherent, you know, you might as well be bonding your soul because you're, you're taking a total leap of faith on whatever this application is, you know, and people do that way more often than we're comfortable with. And it's like, I think it's one of the most important roles for the wallet is, is enabling those like, it's like, you know, 90% of interactions are stuff we get. It's like, oh, token transfers, bidding on an NFT, yada, yada.

It's like what, you know, but then there's that, that, those latest things. And those are the exciting things and we need like pioneers to like yeah basically leap their soul into these abysses and then let us know if it hurt and uh yeah was that mushroom poisonous yeah basically yeah we're like we're at the like eating poisonous mushrooms phase of uh trying out wallet i love in the analogies on this episode guys that we want to uh get into a lot of like product roadmap and trajectories of the ecosystem as a whole. But just a few more details on the merger. After this merger is completed and the teams have cohered, how big will MetaMask be?

How many, like, employees are we talking about right now? It's, it's, we just crossed over 50. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there's like, yeah, there's, yeah, I mean, that's like security. That's like internal tools. that's like, you know, it's between mobile and extension and the shared libraries and our

SNAPS initiative, you know, but. Yeah, but you still have, so that's the core metamast team, right? And then there's also, I think people don't really understand the structure because I didn't understand the structure, but you also have customer support, which is sort of its own adjacent, it's like a Venn diagram. There's overlap, but it's sort of managed in its own way, which is really efficient. and nice and also create some problems. And then there's also like Codify.

That is, again, its own little team, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're working on a lot of different kinds of just ecosystem enhancing features like the swaps feature in MetaMask. And so it's like another group in consensus that we just collaborate really closely with. And like increasingly is becoming like, you know,

a proper part of the team. Like we think of them as one, but we don't count them in our headcounts. Yeah, and that's what I was going to say, is that the head count is weird because the reality is that there aren't these very hard lines in the sand between, say, metamask codify and support. However, if you look at the, I don't know,

the HR documents, there is a very hard line in the sand. So I haven't gotten my head around how big it is now. It's kind of insane. Yeah. And this question... You count after, though, Chris. Yeah. that too. This next question, I think came from Tim Bako, might have come from Danny Ryan. Sorry to whoever asked it on Twitter. But my crypto uses an open source license, but MetaMask uses a proprietary one. So does that mean that my crypto's license is changing or what's going on with that? Yeah, I mean that. I don't know that offhand. It might mean that or we can figure out an exception for it. I think we haven't had that conversation yet. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so just like a comment on

MetaMask license is like we want to be as open as possible. I think when we close down our license, it was partly because we were about to release our first monetization strategy, and we were getting forked upstream of our own product, meaning you're being competed by with by a platform that could distribute us before we could get to our customers. So we were nervous that we just wouldn't even get a chance to make any revenue at all. If we come up with any way or any agreement with like the distribution channels, I think we'd be really excited and eager to just like drop the license again. I think I think long term intellectual property licenses aren't going to succeed just because the internet makes everything just so easy to

copy. And I mean, source code's open. You can you can copy it and distribute it on your own if you wanted to. You know, it's very easy to violate the license. I just can't advise that, you know. But, you know, like I think that long term we're trying to make tools that enable building new social constructs that facilitate, yeah, new ways of making money and new ways of doing business. And yeah, sorry, sometimes we haven't innovated in the social layer before our technological layer, like required revenue and stuff. So I think it's kind of like a first mover disadvantage in a way because, like, you know, like of course, MetaMask wanted to be a lot. a DAO when we started, but there were no wallets to build a DAO with yet. We like had to do the traditional route. But, you know, I think we've got support from consensus to like try to, you know,

we know that, you know, exit to community is a hard road or whatever, but I believe that we have desire to. And it's really a matter of like figuring out the path. So, so, yeah, people who think about exiting to community, who think about new ways of running businesses, keep those ideas flowing because I think, you know, they're going to be the foundation of like everything in the future. Well, exit. Sorry, go ahead, Taylor.

I just want to add on a little bit of context. Like, Metamask is really the first wallet that is actually like successfully monetized period. And I think that it's really easy for people to, especially with the consensus name as well, like look at it as, I don't know. like this traditional thing and this big bad corporate dude in the room or like, oh, they have so much money. What are they doing like that?

Those types of ideas. But I think it's important to realize that one, wallets historically have not monetized at all. And if they have, it's been basically acquiring users to push those users to a secondary product. So like one of the oldest, probably Bitcoin wallets, blockchain, their revenue doesn't come from their wallet. Their revenue came from their block explorer, right? and the advertisements that were served there and stuff.

And the wallet was just a, yeah, it was a user acquisition tool to push towards the Block Explorer and also towards later on like lending dust and OTC dust and stuff. So for Metamask to do this as a wallet and to monetize, I think is an important thing for the industry because as we discussed, the wallet is so, so, so important and key. And it's important that's aligned with users, not that. It's just a user acquisition tool for something else. And I think that now we will see in the next coming years, we've already seen it a little bit.

Now other wallets can raise money on metamast numbers, right? And say this is the path. And if we get this many users, this is a sense of like the money and the revenue that we can do and they can raise money. And that's better for everyone in this ecosystem. I want to just like underline that point. And then we're going to have to, you know, cut to some.

sponsors, but maybe like tease the next, when you guys say like, basically in 2021, wallets and Metamask got its business model. And prior to 2021, it felt like wallets were a public good and suffered from the public good problem of being underfunded yet like you guys were taking on so much support for the industry. Now you have a business model. And that thing is cranking. How do we know this? Because we can see the revenue flows on chains. We're talking cumulative $300 million collected in fees. inception. I can look at that on Dune Analytics and we might after the break. So we'll cover that in a little bit when we come back, David, and I think you've got some other things to cover too, right?

Oh, gosh, we have actually saved some of the best questions for the second half, including like, well, after Swaps features, what feature comes next? Because I've got some ideas, especially in the world of many, many layer twos and bridges. Perhaps a bridge feature is coming, maybe. I would like to pick your guys' brain on that. We have a question from Vitalik about light clients, and we have other questions about social recovery and just other things of that nature. So we're going to ask all of those questions that's going to be super, super exciting,

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Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring bankless. All right guys, we are back with the Metamask team. And as we alluded to right before the sponsor break, the MetaMask swap feature has generally million dollars, almost 300, I think actually over $300 million since inception, which is fantastic. And so Dan and Taylor, what are the next big products coming out of Metamask? What's going to follow a $300 million revenue inside of like three or four months or however long it's been introduced? What comes after swaps? First off, I'll just say to Taylor's last point, like we're not going to go to the direction of pushing people to ads.

because I think that like a wallet's responsibility is to not influence people's buying decisions. And so one thing I think we've always been really, really like strong minded about is like we're trying to make product decisions that empower users to be making informed decisions, but are not like influencing them, are not like facilitating dopamine rushes and addictions towards like, you know, compulsive trading or anything like that. Like it took a long time for us to figure out swaps designs where we felt like it was ethical. That's very web three of you, by the way, Dan. Yeah. Very true ethos. Now, now if we do swaps and we've, or sorry, bridges, and we have experimented and we had an internal hackathon, and we have like a basic one, you know, we had a basic, you know,

hackathon level one working. But if we want to do that, like we want it to be resilient. And a lot of times that would mean, like, not relying on just one bridge, perhaps. Like, so I think one way we're thinking about it is how can we make either an aggregation of bridges or make it user extended. or something. People who know a lot of our past product direction know that pretty big fans of extensibility, like the only way we're going to explode with as much ingenuity as the community has is if we let people just kind of add to the options in real time. So I do think bridging

is a super legitimate case because it's just one of those things where the user shouldn't have to think about it at all, like at the end of the day. Like you should not have to care about whether you're on layer two or not. Like maybe when you're first getting in, knowing the risks of where you're keeping your money, maybe that's like worth having. But then beyond that, it's just like having it, right? So bridging is credible, maybe aggregated yields or, you know, lending or something like that. Things where we can help people like choose from a lot of options. Those are, those are on the table, but they're like going to be supplementary to the core product, which is like helping people interact with new stuff, use DAFs, and help other people be creative.

So there are tons and tons of bridges out there. We had like a panel that had like five of them on for just a layer two bridging conversation. And then there's also a pretty strong handful of bridge aggregators as well that are just aggregating the bridges. And now that Metamask has this insane amount of revenue coming via the swap feature and this pretty healthy treasury, is there a world where Metamask just buys an aggregator and just injects it right into the app. Hmm.

Any bridge aggregators watching, feel free to reach out. Well, I have a follow up on that. So on the subject of bridging, right? So this is also where we get into, you know, some education territory or like some risk management territory. Okay? Because like obviously we just came off of last week.

It feels like it was months ago. Last week, there was a $300 million. dollar something in that range bridge hack on the salana wormhole bridge and so part of our discussion in the bridge panel was like hey there are all of these different bridges but users don't know which bridges carry like what degree of risk Taylor do you have any thoughts on that as somebody who's been like educating user interfaces in the space you know for six years how do we deal with something like that how do you communicate to a user the risk level of the bridge that they're about to cross Yeah, that is, that's the big question. And it's not just about bridges. It's not just about like, I guess like educating people out where their money is. This applies to basically everything that the user is doing. And one of the things that I have been thinking very deeply about for years now is how do we empower each individual user as like that individual person that they are so that they can make an informed, just,

and actually give informed consent to the applications or the protocols that they're interacting with. Because one of the most challenging things as a wallet is like we have people who are brand spanking new. We have people who are, yeah, who don't speak English, who are in countries that I've never heard of. We have, and then we have all the way up to like the most experienced people and like Fetalic is, you know, like that's a crazy sort of spread of demographics. And so when we're thinking about bridges or we're thinking about features in general, it's all about giving the user the ability to understand the right choice so that they can make it for themselves. Because we can't know what individual user's risk tolerance is. And one of the explorations that I did, I think last year with design was like,

can we have like a risk mode, like wrecked that our advanced users can, like, turn on, right? Where they're like, yeah, just give it all. Give it all. Give me all the most like cutting edge fun stuff. Like, would that be a feasible sort of thing that people would find valuable? And the answer is like, well, they'll probably get wrapped, so maybe not. But it did sort of unlock this, this pattern of thinking where we just, we can't know what these or like what their risk tolerances. We can't know if this, like the account that they have in their metamask, is that all of their money? Have they over-invested? Have they over-extended their personal situation? And that's their entire thing. Or is this, you know, one-one thousandth of what

they hold on just Ethereum? You know, and they also have assets spread out everywhere else. And so those are the sorts of things we're thinking about. I think it applies to bridges. It applies to signing transactions. Right. So, We've been working really hard. Both of our teams separately have been working really hard on getting people more insight into their transactions. And that's that, yeah, that will only carry us forward as we see more and more of, as we see the technology just being built faster, right? Like it's insane that in, what, three, four years, we've gone from like,

we've gone from like, I think Battalic after the Dow is like, don't put more than $10 million in a smart contract. And now there's like billions in billions in a single smart contract just sitting there. Like it's absurd. It's insane. I would imagine spanning the gamut between like allowing and enabling somebody's grandmother to use crypto and also at the same time enabling Vitalik Buterin to also use crypto, having to span both of those things.

It's a tall order. And one of the things that we were. are about to span right now are all the chains. And right now, all the layer twos have this nice, fantastic drop-down menu where you can go down and just in Metamask, put down the drop-down menu and select your new layer two. Is that the final form of what a layer-2 metamask looks like? Or as we go through this great layer-2 migration, how is Metamask going to adapt and change to allow users, enable users to be living this many, many multi-chain world?

We've been thinking about it a lot for a long time. And we've finally got some, I think, really strong designs that we really love that we think are going to carry us well into the multi-chain world where, yeah, you should be able to see all your assets in one place. And, yeah, possibly all your accounts, if you want to look at all your accounts at once. And even different types, hardware wallets, contract accounts, you know, on their various chains. but like distinguishing visually when those accounts are a different type or if those assets are on a different chain or if like, you know, if you can't just roll together like ETH and Salana Eith and expect that to be a good long-term U.X. That's the kind of thing where, oh, it's going to look like the best UX at first.

And I could totally see people being like, oh, why don't you do that? Like this wallet shows those as the same asset, right? And then you get half wrecked and you're like, you know, and that's, you know, and that's, you know, that's one of those learning moments. But I do think that there's a path to letting people make that choice themselves. So like we've got the idea of, you know, you should be able to still have a portfolio of you. And if you want to deliberately treat things as one asset, like you should be able to also. So yeah, yeah, the network drop down menu is basically like a legacy design thing. It's practically left over from a time that I feel like we started and thought Ethereum would just carry everything.

And, you know, that is just so, so long gone that, you know, we, you know, I think we did a great job of, you know, kind of coming up with the compromises that built on top of what we have, coming up with like an API for adding new networks to your menu. And that's good enough to carry us for a little while. And, you know, it's like, like most of our usage today is not, you know, is on non-Etherium networks. So, so clearly it's like working as like a monkey patch. But for that full future where we're just like swimming and, you know, very. various types of digital authority from various sources. Like, yeah, it'd be cool if you have like an asset manager that just kind of gracefully handles all of it for you. Is there a world where Metamask expands beyond EVM chains and starts to talk to other blockchains like Solana or Terra or anything that doesn't run on an EVM? Well, I mean, these days, just to be an Ethereum wallet means running some non-EVM stuff, right?

like from like fuel labs's roll-ups to, I mean, even really Starkware and ZK Sync while they're getting like, you know, let's say very close to, you know, you can compile your solidity to them. They're not true VM machines. So supporting Ethereum L2s requires us being dynamic enough to support like arbitrary execution environments. And so, yeah, we're working on our, we've got our extensibility system snaps in now a totally public auto-updating beta called Flask. So developers can play with that. And yeah, you can build the beginnings of Solana support for MetaMask today if you wanted to. Now, it's going to be a little while longer.

We're refining a lot of those APIs to make them integrate smoothly into the UI. Like right now, they don't actually add much UI. They give you the ability to add an API to websites. So you can kind of start with DAFs and prompt the user for consent, which is like kind of our core job is like, talk to DAPS. and get consent from the user and then interact with private keys. And so that's what SNAPS can do today. But it's going to keep on integrating more and more deeply with the wallet.

And long term, I think that our support for all chains is going to be pretty much equivalent. And it's just going to be like your wallet. Is this like, you know, it's like your collection of the chains that you subscribe to, the accounts you keep on those and the assets that they contain? And then this next question comes from Polynia. Any social recovery features coming in the future, perhaps? Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, social recovery is, it's been like one of those things where for so long it,

I remember what like at the UX summit in Toronto and like 2017, people were like saying that research showed people will never accept social recovery. So I'm super grateful to while it's like Argent who are like validating it. And I, but I think that the design space for user consensual recovery, recovery mechanisms is actually huge. And so that's, again, a reason that I'm excited about building an extensibility system because we're going to build a system where you can add arbitrary smart contracts. Now, average person isn't going to onboard and then start picking out plugins. So there's going to be an important phase where we like choose validated solutions and recommend

them to people. And I think there's like a really important responsibility for like stepping users through like what their risk preference is like you know hey do you happen to have a perfect memory have I got a solution you know or do you have some friends you can trust but you know not everybody even has those things um you know so social recovery as an is an excellent tool I don't think it's a cure all but I think that it like points at like a much better direction long term for all sorts of wallets and then sorry Taylor you want to go ahead yeah I was I just wanted to say one thing, sorry, would the possible flow, Dan be like, let's say you're setting up MetaMask for the first time, you get your seed phrase, that sort of thing. And then there's some kind of a button, which is like,

oh, here's, you know, third party smart contract that's, you know, semi-trusted, but it could be a list. It could be one. It could be multiple where you can activate social recovery. Not necessarily something that Meta-Mask builds, but these third parties kind of extend or snap into the metamask ecosystem. Is that right? These third-party smart. I'm saying, what I'm saying is that when we're ready, you won't even need to back up your seed phase in the first place. Well, I mean, my point is just like, during onboarding, we should be able to give people options, right? The seed phrase is the secret recovery phrase, sorry, is that we're trying to normalize that because you understand what the heck seed phrase means. Depending on people's risk preferences, if people are willing to keep a secret, maybe the secret recovery phrase is the right solution.

But if they're going social recovery right off the bat, they're like, oh, yeah. I know I've got three friends who are crypto natives and they all have their accounts backed up. So I trust them and I trust their ability to have their accounts back up. If we can establish that, then yeah, we don't need you memorizing keys. We just need to know who your friends are. So, so yeah, like I think that like collaborating with the user to figure out the best solution for them is probably the long term answer. Yeah. And I think to provide a little bit more context about basically everything that Dan says,

Dan doesn't isn't thinking about like what the experience is today and what the experience is tomorrow, right? So like when we think about like, okay, social recovery is a thing. So metamask can add an option to this one view that exists today so that the user can have a choice. No, no, we're talking about like there's a multitude of ways to access your account. One of them is the secret recovery phrase. One of them is social recovery. But there's also a whole bunch of current technologies and future technologies. that are coming down the pipeline, that will enable people to access or sign transactions,

right? Not even access seekers, just sign transactions. So what Dan wants to sort of set up is not specifically putting social recovery in that one view of MetaMask, but enabling an extensible system where anyone who builds something that's worthwhile can add it to MetaMask. and then anyone who finds that thing to be valuable, whether it's like a safety thing or whether it's accessing a new experimental high-risk defy thing, they'll be able to do so. And as the individual, they'll be able to access these different things.

And that doesn't necessarily impact every metamask user, right? When we're talking about 30 million users, like it's a big decision to add a single bridge, right? The consideration is not just like, is this risky or not the consideration. It's also like, you know, what does it mean for Metamask to put that in and support their development? It also means what does it mean to essentially vouch for them and their credibility? And the same applies to not just bridge to everything. So by sort of decentralizing the very feature set and also making Metamask this sort of core element in which every you, user has their individual sort of like set of things. That is that's where like that's where we're headed. We're not just like trying to add social recovery. You know what I mean? And it's not going to be a short path. It's a long-term vision. But it's really exciting. It sounds like Netscape is getting extensions. Yeah, yeah. We're getting there. And one other just an example of how like the design space like goes way beyond even social recovery accounts is like not all things even fit the

account paradigm. So like take the tornado cash voucher, for example, you go to tornado cash, you deposit some ETH, and then you get a new secret to keep track of. And it's like right now, what do you do with that? You like, David's a desktop. Yeah, save it to desktop. Like, I don't know, like it's like your wallet's keeping a little encrypted vault, you know, I have password manager's probably a better solution for now. But like, like being able to just hold all your digital assets, like you're regardless of like how they're controlled is like, I think a long term really, really strong, you know, guiding light for us. Okay, one more question before the fun one that everyone wants us to ask, which I think people will know is coming, is that this one's from Vitalik Buteran,

so you know it's a good one. When, like client verification for Metamask. Yeah, yeah, really. It's been such a really long dream. And, you know, we had a project called Moostakala, and we had, we had a small team working on it back in the Meta Mask as a public goods that is underfunded days. and they were, you know, it probably should have been a, you know, 20-person team, but it was three people. And they, they were stretched very thin. And so we, we did not achieve that goal, but a lot of those people went on to bigger teams and started working on those bigger clients. And, you know, so some of those ideas went into TurboGath. Some of those ideas are going into Laconic that should be launching soon. I'm super eager for those. The truth is that our team isn't really working on like protocol development. So we're kind of like, Hey, you know, you tell us, you know, like I think we're incredibly eager to support whatever options users could want. And especially once we have like, let's say a desktop client, being able to like let a user turn on various types of clients will be a real option for us. Can we can we just zoom out for a minute? Because we asked that in protocol researcher

Vitalik language when like client verification. I want to zoom out so everyone understands. They might have heard this as like there's kind of a metamast. dependency on infura, for instance, or like third parties to serve the chain. And if these API services go down, then we can't use metamask, that sort of thing. That's what Vitalik means by light client verification. Is that right, Dan? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way, because today, if you want to run a Ethereum client and, like, not have to trust Infura for your data, you have to run this much more heavyweight process. The Ethereum protocol, I think, was designed to take up a whole personal computer. So the average,

person is not running that on their phone. And so, yeah, plugging into Infura or some, you know, centrally hosted thing ends up being the norm. Light clients imply that there's a lighter process that the user might keep on their device, you know, their laptop, phone, desktop, whatever, that might just be a little more practical. You know, a thing, though, is, you know, Metamask does let you connect to any source of information even today. So if there were a viable light client today, you know, please ship it as a desktop app, write a simple guide to how to point Metamask to it. We could be doing it already. Of course, if that gets validated, we'll be very eager to fold it into the product. But, but yeah, like, we are not really doing that protocol development

in-house presently. So we're really counting on and hoping for people working on, you know, stateless client design and stuff like that and very, very eager for it to come along. guys this has been a lot of fun absolutely fantastic to have you both on really excited about the merger and how many more millions of monthly active users we can onboard to crypto and on board to web three that's that's what this is all about and i wish i could blame this last question on the chat i'm sure they've asked but the secret is david and i really wanted to ask as well and i feel like this is fair game dan because you you mentioned the term exit to community so we got to ask, when mask token? Is that a thing? Is that coming? Is there anything you can say about that?

I can probably say that it's not enough of a thing that you should be getting excited about it right now. Yes. Do not change your behavior because someone on the internet told you those in that token. If some new account messages you and lets you know about the upcoming air drop, they're probably lying. We've got ideas for tokens and we've got permission to explore those ideas. But the truth is like, like we were saying about, you know, our job is to keep users safe. So when we endorse something, like it has the potential to just absolutely undermine all of our credibility. So we're going to, if we do anything, we're going to do it because we got it right.

And a lot of the utility, you know, a lot of the token ideas we have, they might not be the things that people would be excited about. You know, I think people would be excited to just get an irdrop in their wallet. Well, you know, like I said on a recent interview, like, unfortunately, we've done okay at keeping our users private. So we actually don't know who all our users are. You know, there are things we could do, you know, they're, you know, but those things become gameable. As soon as people circulate, they're like, just use swaps a lot. It's like, okay, well, if we're trying to do a fair drop, we're not going to over rely on that. You know, we're not trying to pick something that you can game.

So, you know, just make responsible decisions for yourself. And if we choose to do any token to enable our product, we'll get it to you in the most responsible way possible. Don't try to game it. Don't try to, don't trust links sent to you on Twitter. Just like let it be a surprise when it unexpectedly happens in the very distant future. It sounds like, Taylor's really like, oh, pump the brakes, guys. So it sounds like you guys are approaching the token with the way that you approach everything else,

every other feature about Metamass, which is with caution, with patience, and with saying no before you say yes. So it sounds like you guys are into the concept or possibility of a token and are ready to say yes to it if the idea is right. And if you guys discover the optimum use case in a way that aligns with you guys as ethos and treats your guys as users the way that you want to treat them. Alleged token. Alleged token. Alleged token. Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's probably the most fair take.

I just want to emphasize, like, not only do we have, like, pretty severe PTSD from years of people making empty promises in return for tokens that then end up users of our products and emailing our supports, right? Like, not only that, but we've also seen, like, the variety of ways that incentives can just like kind of muck everything up and ended up, I guess, more exploitative than empowering. And so when I think about like a token, when I think about, I guess the goal of all of this, right, I think about how will this improve the user's life, like an individual user's life? And I got that doing an air drop improves everyone's life, you know, dropping free money on people's faces.

but, you know, it's got to be fair. I think it's got to be empowering. And I think it really has to be careful about the incentives that we create. We don't want to create an incentive to, say, you know, a third party and outside malicious person. We don't want to create that incentive for them to attack every Madameascuser, right? And we don't necessarily even want to like kind of put every metamask user on blasts say, hey, there's a MetaMask user, go get them.

And so these are all the sort of concerns that we have. And I think that lastly, I just want to comment that some of the most important people, I guess, in this space to MetaMask as a product are not necessarily the users. Like, they're who get the most attention, but DAF developers are probably, like, insanely important. And it's because there is something to do on Ethereum. that MetaMask has the users it does. And it's also because there's things to do in Ethereum

that users have things to do, right, and money to make and games to play. So how I'm sort of like looking at the different potentials and thinking about this is like you have these distinct groups and they all interact in certain ways. How can we create something that empowers all of them and makes all of them better? And also like funds good.

things coming forward, right? Not just dropping for money, but actually, I don't know, incentivizing good building and best practices. Well, there you go, guys. No mass token to announce today, of course, maybe it's on the distant horizon. We don't know, but if MetaMas does it, they're going to do it right is the comment. Maybe it's outside. And hopefully they'll do a live stream with us. Yeah, exactly. Come back on that day. If such a day were to occur in the future, Anyway, guys, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for talking about wallets with us. Such an important application for crypto, we really appreciate it. Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us. Also, we forgot, if you want to work for us because we're like always hiring, please like get in Mirr Dan's DMs because we're growing our team like a lot, a lot, especially security and dev rel marketing communications people. As we say so often in crypto, get a job in crypto. 2022 should be the year you get a job in crypto. Like we have sustainable business models, okay? Like we have recurring revenue.

Get a job. So we will link to you Taylor and Dan's Twitter accounts. And hopefully you get some interested applications in your DMs. Of course, guys, risk and disclaimers. None of this has been financial advice. This entire journey is risky. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is.

Defi is. You can definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.