MetaMask Co-founder: Reflections, Reviews, and Beliefs After Six Years of Entrepreneurship

Original Title: 《MetaMask Girds for Crypto Winter by Drawing Lessons From the Last One》

Authors: Aaron Davis & Dan Finlay, MetaMask

Compiled by: Biscuit, Chain Catcher

From our beginnings as a pair of eager technologists looking to make our mark in a brand new crypto industry, it’s hard to believe how far MetaMask has come in the past six years. While this anniversary is worth celebrating, we should also reflect on MetaMask’s growth and how this six-year journey has shaped its spirit.

Our history dates back to 2013 when we were both contributing to an open-source project called VoxelJS while working at a startup named MochaLeaf. After it was acquired by Apple, we shifted our focus to VoxelJS, a software engine that allows users to create Minecraft-like browser games. Over the next few years, we ventured into other areas, including peer-to-peer networks, and proposed a slew of crazy, ambitious ideas to change the world.

We were captivated by many concepts in the crypto space, particularly at the intersection of technology, politics, and data sovereignty. Ideas such as creating more efficient and participatory governance systems and enabling the democratization of wealth distribution felt bold and exciting to us.

2016-2020 The Years of Self-Reliance

When Ethereum launched in 2015, ideas like DAOs and alternative currencies emerged, and we knew many users were eager to participate, but there was no infrastructure to support the necessary operations. Thus, the idea of an account manager running in the browser was born, which led to the creation of MetaMask.

We understood that realizing this novel concept of Web3 would depend on whether the space had infrastructure built in a sustainable and well-managed way, characterized by being distributed, resilient, open, and participatory.

Aaron developed the first version of MetaMask, a rather complex "browser-in-browser" tool, and later Dan joined the team, transforming the entire product into a simple web extension. After several rounds of back-and-forth adjustments, we finally produced something that caught developers' attention at the 2016 hackathon, and thus MetaMask was born.

Within a year, we hired our first developers, but that was still not enough to meet the massive demand we saw during the ICO boom in 2017. As more and more users rushed into the crypto space, we worked tirelessly to refine the infrastructure and enhance its security.

Of course, after the market peak around Christmas 2017, the bullish sentiment quickly evaporated. Like many other founders, we took this opportunity to calm down during the crypto winter and focused on building our platform.

In 2018, we held a meeting and began discussing how to expand MetaMask by allowing users to add networks beyond Ethereum. By 2019, the Snaps project was initiated, providing developers with the opportunity to securely connect dApps to MetaMask.

At this point, we were not a true revenue-generating project. Thanks to the support of ConsenSys and Joe Lubin, we were able to break even financially, as they believed in our goals and motivations, as well as the willingness of community enthusiasts to help us build.

Therefore, when the cryptocurrency market bottomed out in March 2020, although we were concerned about the crypto ecosystem's ability to recover after being severely hit, we continued to build and launched the Swaps feature in the second half of the year. With this feature, we finally established a sustainable revenue model, allowing the company to begin growing and focusing more on serving users.

2020-2022 Expanding Utility and Significant Growth

It turned out that while the crypto market in 2020 created severe lows, it also broke through epic highs. That summer, the seeds sown in the DeFi industry over the past two years began to bear fruit.

The launch of Compound’s COMP token propelled the DAO movement, and the growth rate across the entire cryptocurrency space was almost ruthlessly explosive over the past two years.

MetaMask, as a mature product that addressed many key requirements of the ecosystem at the onset of DeFi summer, naturally became the primary gateway to decentralized yield platforms. The rise of NFTs and the explosion of blockchain gaming in 2021 made MetaMask valuable to a new global user base in crypto.

By August 2021, our monthly active users had surpassed 10 million, making MetaMask the world’s leading non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet. By 2022, thanks to the potential of Web3 and the metaverse still being in its infancy, our monthly active users had exceeded 30 million.

We have remained steadfastly focused on strategically growing our team, and the state of our team has never been more vibrant, systematically completing our roadmap and addressing user needs.

For MetaMask users, there have been countless exciting achievements along the way, but we have always been very careful to avoid limiting MetaMask to serving a single dApp or use case. Our mission is to better serve developers and users who want to build and engage in crypto experiments, as these tools become increasingly accessible.

Our roadmap may seem ambitious in some areas because we have a very clear understanding of the multifunctionality that crypto wallets should possess.

Bear Markets and Beyond

Having experienced more than one crypto bull-bear market cycle, we are not afraid of the bear market in 2022, especially considering the epic growth we have achieved over the past six years and even the past two years.

Just like the crypto winter of 2018 and 2019, a new generation of Web3 developers is building, and we are anticipating changes in the crypto landscape that may emerge in the next cycle, bringing improvements in privacy, interoperability, security, and user experience to MetaMask.

Moreover, with the rapid development of Web3, we believe that the market cycles of crypto assets will be less destructive to crypto use cases. It is clear that even during bear markets, a significant number of users continue to use MetaMask for crypto activities unrelated to investment or finance, such as gaming, social media, identity, art, collaboration, or other types of transactions.

Therefore, as a battle-hardened crypto team, we remain highly optimistic about the future. The bear market may last for a while, but many users have already tasted the benefits of owning their own digital contracts and assets, and this momentum will not fade; neither will MetaMask.

Now we are embarking on the next six years of infrastructure building, and we hope to continue bringing the power of distributed cryptographic systems to users around the world. Thanks to the millions of passionate individuals worldwide who walk alongside MetaMask, making it all possible.