Hey everybody, it's MetaMask Alpha Live and I'm here with the MetaMask Alpha CEO and chairman of MetaMask Joe Lubin. We're going to talk about the future of MetaMask, future of crypto, future of the future. How are you doing today, sir?
Excellent, Mr. Max. Thank you for having me on your show.
Great to catch up with you again. Thanks for taking the time. So the first thing that's probably on a lot of people's minds today, I spent more time today watching C-SPAN than I usually do to check out the cloture vote of the Clarity Act, which did not move forward today. Curious if you have any reactions.
High drama. What was the actual vote count?
I do not have it in front of me. I turned off when it was about 10 votes shy.
So you don't know how many Dems potentially crossed the aisle, like none?
I don't. I will look that up very quickly, though. It was looking pretty party lines the last I checked.
Yeah. So this may sound controversial, but I've been saying for a while and some other people that I consider learned that A, we're going to achieve market clarity no matter what, whether it was through legislative means or whether it's through rule making from the agencies. I am confident that the SEC and CFTC under Mr. Atkins and Mr. Seelig are very ready to continue to introduce rules that will provide clarity regarding market structure and reduce uncertainty for either organizations that are building in the decentralized protocol and crypto space or financial institutions, FMIs, or just enterprises that are considering minting assets, tokenizing assets, real-world assets or other making use of DeFi. I think that's the big unlock that we were really looking forward to, just give organizations permission to start using DeFi, to move into this world. You know, the internet enabled us to digitize information and bring it into the global economy, then e-commerce, mobile, social. This next generation of the internet and the web technologies, web 3, enables us to do the same thing, to digitize and democratize trust and value. And so to the extent that the agencies can get that done, and I'm very confident that it's going to be a whirlwind, that this is going to be an unfortunate mistake for those who are trying to slow it down because it's going to move really fast and it's going to be great for the economy in my opinion. Decentralized protocols plus AI is likely to supercharge the American and global economy faster and bigger than ever. And so I think this may end up being a better path forward for our ecosystem and for the world because I think that we're going to just have to cement all this in, lock it all in, not via legislation, although that'll probably come eventually, but by building and innovating. And I think there's going to be an enormous amount of investment in our industry that feels unlocked because the rule-making, the agencies dispel some of the uncertainty and give permission to use DeFi, to invest in crypto, crypto plus AI companies. And so it's up to us to make it all compelling and to bring so much capital into DeFi, into TradFi on DeFi, into TradFi building on their own protocols on decentralized rails, that you know, just like 5 years into Uber, try to take Uber away from the population, you just can't do it. So I think that's where we're going to get to in 2 years.
Well, I like the optimism and I think MetaMask is going to play a pretty big part of that compelling storytelling that we'll get to in a second. Yeah. For the record, zero Democrats voted in favor of cloture and it was 11 votes shy of the 60 needed. So, quite a partisan thing.
So, they did not get it done. It's amazing that somebody's anti-crypto army had enough power to just shut down the debate. That's very disappointing, but ultimately blowback. We'll see how that goes.
Well, you're still building and we're still building in the meantime and particularly with MetaMask, you know, the big announcement last week that MetaMask becoming its own company spinning out from ConsenSys as a brand. So, you know, when you look back over the 10 years of MetaMask, which 10th birthday was earlier this summer, you know, from basically starting as what was an Ethereum signing wallet to what it is today, you know, what brought us to this point where MetaMask was ready to become its own company?
Yeah, decade of innovation. A lot of the primitives in the wallet space appeared first in MetaMask. So, it started as a sort of niche developer tool. We didn't do any marketing for a really long time. It was developers, it was protocols. Mostly people reached out to us for some assistance in how to integrate to MetaMask and then podcasters would start talking about how to make use of a protocol or service and say, 'So, first open your MetaMask or if you don't have MetaMask, go download it.' And so, because we were so early, it massively aided us in terms of growing our distribution to something that's really quite massive for right now for the crypto industry at least. So, it became effectively the default gateway. There are certainly some other wallets that are significant, but in the EVM space, MetaMask continues to be massively dominant. So, it's been the gateway for tens of millions of people in around 190 countries now. So, very global. We have the advantage that we're a software company, not a regulated financial institution. So, if there's something that's uncontroversial or something that doesn't need special handling in different regions, we can roll out a new feature in 190 countries simultaneously. So, that's a massive advantage. So, when we got bigger, scale essentially changed what we needed to do. We weren't just maintaining a wallet, we were responsible for how an increasingly large population first touches tokens, first touches on-chain money and DeFi protocols. So, that caused us to think quite a bit about the nature of money over time and what our relationship as individuals to qualitatively new forms of money needs to be, needs to evolve into. And so, we've been iteratively building many interoperating features as you may have noticed. And they both make sense together and they also synergize or supercharge each other. So these are swaps, bridges, fiat on-ramps, earn, card, perps, prediction markets, tokenized equity, and the money account. We and our users essentially needed MetaMask to be where our money lives, where our money comes alive, and actually works for us, not just where it rests securely or where transactions get signed again securely. So, the wallet product had to grow into something that could be thought of as a financial super app. So, I've been calling it a neo bank, but it's not a neo bank in the same sense. We're trying to avoid that term neo bank because it's a new kind of thing. It's like a financial super app that you fully own and control. There is no company that owns your account as would be the case with a neo bank. So, effectively, we're thinking this is a personal money OS, a personal money operating system. And this is where our thinking is now and I guess we'll be expanding very significantly on this thinking.
