MetaMask prepares for crypto winter with last year's lessons
MetaMask's co-founders reflect on six years building their crypto wallet venture.
MetaMask has come a long way from its founding by two techies anxious to make their mark in a new business. We want to reflect on MetaMask's progress and how our journey has formed its ethos.
We both worked on the open source VoxelJS project in 2013. Apple bought our startup MochaLeaf. VoxelJS bonded us. It's a software engine for Minecraft-style browser games. Over the next few years, we dabbled in peer-to-peer networking and had crazy, ambitious notions for changing the world.
We were both drawn to crypto's combination of technology, politics, and data sovereignty. Daring and fascinating ideas included building more effective and democratic governing systems and democratizing income distribution.
2016-2020: Bootstrapping
When Ethereum started in 2015, giving rise to DAOs and alternative currencies, we knew we wanted to plunge in headfirst, but the infrastructure wasn't there. MetaMask is a browser-based account management.
We realized that realizing web3 required a sustainable, well-governed infrastructure. Distributed, robust, open, and participatory were required.
Dan stripped Aaron's "browser-in-browser" application down to a simple web extension. After numerous rounds of back-and-forth, we have something good enough to attract engineers to events and hackathons. So 2016 brought MetaMask.
After the 2017 holiday season, bullish views vanished. We used crypto winter to construct our platform, like many other founders.
We hired our first few of coders within a year, but it wasn't enough to tackle the ICO boom in 2017. As eager users flocked to the new platform, we pulled all-nighters and stressed its infrastructure and security.
After the 2017 holiday season, bullish feelings swiftly faded. We used crypto winter to construct our platform, like many other founders.
In 2018, we organized a retreat to investigate scaling MetaMask by adding other networks. By 2019, the Snaps project allowed developers to safely increase MetaMask's dApp features.
We weren't making money yet. ConsenSys and Joe Lubin believed in our vision and motivation as founders, and the community participated in what we were building.
When March 2020 approached and the crypto market crashed, we worried running out of runway. Ecosystems struggled. Later that year, we released Swaps. With this launch, we finally had a viable business source that would allow us to focus on serving people.
2020-2022: Increasing Use, Stellar Growth
2020 saw epic highs and lows. The DeFi sector's two-year-old seedlings started bearing fruit this summer.
Since Compound launched its COMP currency, the crypto sector has grown at a dizzying speed.
MetaMask was the primary entryway to the booming industry in decentralized yield-generating platforms because it was an established product at the start of DeFi summer. NFTs and play-to-earn blockchain gaming boosted MetaMask's value in 2021.
MetaMask had 10 million monthly active users by August 2021, making it the world's top non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet. We've hit 30 million monthly active users in 2022, with web3 and the metaverse still in their infancy.
We've focused on strategically developing our workforce, and now we're better organized to handle our roadmap and user needs.
MetaMask has many fascinating integrations in the works, but we're not focusing on one set of dapps or use cases. Our objective is to service the tremendous amount of ideas developers and consumers will produce as tools improve.
Our roadmap is certainly as bold as it can be at this juncture, and some of our aims may be too ambitious, but a wallet's adaptability for the distributed internet of value has never been apparent.
Beyond Bear Markets
Having lived and flourished through more than one market cycle, we're unfazed by the bear market of 2022, especially given the recent gains.
The new generation of web3 developers are working, and we're seeing how the landscape will shift over the next cycle, bringing advances in privacy, interoperability, safety, and user experience.
As web3 grows, we expect crypto-asset market cycles will become less disruptive for our many use cases. Despite the bad market, many users continue to utilize MetaMask for gaming, social networking, identity, art, cooperation, and other transactions.
As crypto seniors, we're enthusiastic about the future. People have tasted owning digital contracts and assets, and that momentum isn't going away, and neither is MetaMask.
Here's to another six years of establishing the infrastructure needed to use distributed cryptography systems. Thanks to the millions of passionate people that joined us on this trip.