MetaMask hits 1M Monthly Users & MetaMask Swaps | Jacob Cantele, Head of Product

Transcript

[Music] the banquet state the nations are brought to you by wiring wiring is defy's first self-building community run project which i just get really really excited about iron is a system that seeks out yield in defy and it does that in a number of different ways a very aggressive way is with the vaults where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice and different defy experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token right and so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in d5 for those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins the urn system is for you where you can deposit your preferred stable coin and wire will go and figure out which money market on defy and defy

is producing the best interest rate whether it's dydx it's compound or ave it looks around d5 to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically so you don't have to check them out at yearn.finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well we're also brought to you by monolith monolith is your cool new defy account your d5 savings account your d5 checking account except the cool thing about the monolith defy account is that it gets software updates right you actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time so here are some of the features monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know defy and what it is you can you can add money to

it you can put that money to work uh in compound and accessing yield uh but you can and you can also swap through uniswap what was cool with monolith is that they will send you a very sexy monolith visa card that connects to your smart monolith smart contract wallet on ethereum so it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a a savings account that gets software updates so this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world but you can still do real world things with you know real money and like buy your groceries so that's just fantastic coming soon to monolith actually already here to monolith is now you can buy die and get it sent to your wallet directly right so it's also being an on-ramp so you don't

have to go through your centralized exchange like coinbase or gemini or wherever you can just go straight from your bank account right into your monolith checking account smart contract wallet so check them out at monolith.xyz all right well let's dig into uh some of that drum rolling in today's episode is we should be jacob introducing from metamask he is on the product team at metamask jacob it's great to see you how are you doing today i'm doing great uh thank you so much for having me ryan and david i really appreciate you guys welcome welcome well it's awesome to have you here we are obviously huge fans of metamask both ourselves of course um you know you know super users maybe like use it every day

and also the bankless community i know is composed of a whole bunch of people that are daily active users of metamask but i want to talk about like first this impressive milestone that you guys recently uh reached which is you have recently exceeded over a million monthly active users on metamask can you kind of break down what that means for metamask and how that data was collected jacob yeah so uh so thank you so much for saying that ryan um so i think uh a lot of people remember uh just a little over a year ago

we very first hit a million total installs and that was just in general installs we've been seeing compounding growth in metamask especially towards the end of 2019 we saw a lot of growth of users who were in who are using taos and who are playing games using using metamask and then this this year the the d5 space has also has taken that previous growth and is compounding it again and really what you see is when

a when a user onboards into one site they start using one app that compounds and the value for the entire ecosystem uh grows so we we sort of think of ourselves as a universal solution that's serving the entire ecosystem we're not just a gaining wallet or a d5 wallet or a dow wallet or a payments wallet we're all of those things and people are compounding into one or joining into one use case and then they're going and discovering value and all these other things and we think it's the same kind of feedback loop that you get with the internet generally so you know like uh there there's certainly a place for for

niche apps that focus on one use case or another but we think that by by creating uh the most value possible for our users and the most universal and most interoperable solution that we're going to be able to to do the best for the for the developer ecosystem and and for the community itself to start discovering all these sites and apps all yeah you were just showing the countries um those are on our on our mobile growth um i i just want to point those out um we're seeing a ton of growth um especially in in developing countries where people are using this for payments

they're using it for for daily survival they're using it also to try out defined games and depths and we're super excited to be able to provide those kinds of financial services to people who are who have historically been locked out of the traditional financial system so for people in the podcast who can't see what we're showing on youtube the top four countries in terms of metamask mobile volume where first the united states but second india third nigeria and fourth the philippines uh these last three are pretty surprising and i think maybe that demonstrates what exactly what you're talking about yeah there there's a there's huge

community growth and there's um especially like mobile in a lot of those countries most people principally are using a cell phone they're not using a desktop computer or something like that so there's a lot of people who've been waiting for this to to really um to really start joining the ecosystem and our mobile launch has really really helped with that it's also worth saying that the mobile app in its first month past the peak of where the extension was for the for the whole of 2019.

um so we're really excited about that growth um this this chart you're showing here this is showing just the constant month over month growth that we're seeing and the compounding value that that we're we're seeing for the ecosystem it looks a bit like a hockey stick i would say jacob you asked a little bit about how we how we get the data yeah so we're not using on-chain data i want to be super clear that this uh there's not duplicates or something like that um some some people were like well one person it's probably just people making a bunch of accounts or something we have an opt-in consensual thing that we call metametrics if people google

metametrics you can read in detail about our methodology for how we do analytics we let the user opt in uh to to analytics directly we don't even on the users who opt-in we don't track ip address um we're very serious about privacy and and protecting protecting the privacy of our users we want web3 to be an alternative to these companies like facebook and google that are treating people like products and that are treating data as you know as a commodity and instead we want you know

we want to our our mission is to democratize access to the decentralized web we want the decentralized web to be available to everyone we want a transactional layer on the internet that allows people to to consensually have interactions and permissions and privacy and to create a better internet and we want to transform the internet in the financial system um so our our metrics solution we take those who have opted in to the metrics and then we also track those who have opted out of metrics we get one tracking event that tells us that someone has uh that someone track that someone opted out and then we don't track them any further

so we have ratios about um about how many how many total or what what the percentages of people who are opted into the metrics are and then we use the data that we have on people who have opted in and then we project that to the the total number to arrive at a real monthly active user number so do you know what percentage of people opt in so like what what's the sample size that that is of the whole so um it changes month to month when we very first rolled it out the people who opted out was a higher proportion it was like around a little higher than 25 percent

and today it's it's around 18 um and we sort of uh grouped together uh the the last six month of data six months of data to get a an accurate number of where we're at today um yeah so sometimes it's really historically it's really hard to like calculate how many people use d5 right because i have i have at least 10 wallets that that i've used you know in the last like two years in ethereum right however i think metamask it's actually a little easier to get rid of some of the noise because with metamask it's really just the number of devices you have rather than the number of wallets you have right and

so inside of metamask i could have 10 wallets but i would only have one meta mask right and so i my intuition is to assume that some of the data that's coming out of metamask is a lot less noisy than like somebody that is looking at like unique addresses that have used compound or maker dow or uniswap is my intuition correct there that's right so we're we're we when a person opts into metametrics we're just getting one event for all their accounts so these are much more accurate we're not tracking like oh you have 10 accounts so that's 10 users no that we're we're trying to to do real uh real data and make this available for

the ecosystem and we want to use it to to benefit the ecosystem cool okay cool just one last little nuance on there so like if the metamask was like my first wallet right so i've had my metamask seed phrase basically since forever and so i've used i've actually put that metamask seed phrase in a couple of my devices would you guys count those as one one user or like one still one uh one user per device so we don't we we will for privacy reasons we will not associate a uh the consensual tracking cookie with your seed phrase across multiple devices okay so if you did use

you know two different devices that would count as multiple monthly active users um most people don't do that um although we do see a lot of people that have the extension in mobile um so there there is some element of duplication there and okay so what what were you surprised about when you got some of this data was any of this data like shocking uh you know if i if you ask me like oh metamask one you know one million monthly active users coming hot on the heels of d5 yield farming i would have been like well yeah that's because of the d5 yield farming but you're telling me that there's some extra stuff going on um so was that surprising was that was that new information for you guys and like and also how has that kind of changed

the trajectory or priorities of what you guys are working on at metamask internally so we do we do get numbers on the dapps that people are using on in a given month um so we have we have uh not not that an individual is using but we get um we get aggregate metrics about which which apps are more popular and stuff like that so uh we you know the month over month changes of what dapps people are using vary wildly like every month um and actually it's really fun um in my role to like go and i can just see like oh what's what's the top 10 this month and go and try all of them um it's it's been

really uh really fun for me um but uh you know most months the most popular thing that thing that people do is send payments to one another or just send transactions to another wallet or something like that um after that the dex category tends to be uh the most popular um then in in most recent months it's that and then the d5 d5 use cases are are number three and then uh and then games and then dowse uh and within each of those categories the sites that are the most popular they

vary wildly um the the space is just growing so rapidly and there there's so many new use cases and new sites and new platforms that uh there's not just like a consistent oh this is what people do in metamask and i think that by by trying to be permissionless and give people a platform for innovation and um to empower the developer ecosystem we're we're best positioned to uh to serve those those many use cases another really cool thing jacob about this metric is this is a very common web 2 metric right like if you look at like

annual reports of a facebook or the social any social platform they're going to report out in monthly active users and daily active users and that's exactly what this is they don't quite understand other metrics that defy use such as like you know maybe active wallets or amount of value total locked um so so that's pretty cool but i'm also like i just want to um step back and think about one million users of a d5 a bankless d5 wallet product that is a fantastically huge milestone i remember at uh in the quarter one the first quarter of this year we were talking about like what's the size what's the population of everybody who

uses d5 and the numbers came out around you know 250 000 to 300 000 people right so the the size of a small u.s city you know like a richmond virginia or something like that now here we are six months later uh and we've got uh metrics that are telling us there are 1 million monthly active users in d5 well now we've grown from a city the size of a richmond virginia and now we're a san jose now we're in austin texas like that's a major uh metropolis at this point um i can't wait to see as we extrapolate that hockey stick forward how it grows well you know how long until we're larger than a small

nation for example and then how long after that until we're larger than the united states of america um so it's very exciting to see these numbers and uh congrats to you know your success for helping to onboard the world world into a bankless money system we really appreciate what you guys are doing at metamask um i want to transition to another exciting element i think that's coming out with metamask is you guys are you dropped the mobile wallet which is super cool a number of us particularly i would say that the d5 super users among us uh really love the desktop version and love the desktop version because it's so damn versatile like you can do

anything with it so any defy app it just kind of works out of the box natively you can do things um like connect your your ledger hardware wallet to it so it feels like if you're if you're prioritizing security it is one of the most secure ways to actually use defy you don't have to trust a smart contract wallet which they're coming along but they're somewhat new so like metamask is fantastic for that and you guys are starting to add some more features i think i'm seeing to the desktop version as well and that's starting with this idea of metamask swaps can you talk about metamask swaps uh and in general what's kind of in store for the feature set of the desktop version here hey guys

we're going to get to the topic of meta mask swaps with jacob but first we're going to pause the state of the nation to talk about our fantastic bankless sponsors unstoppable domains has two products that's helping make the crypto world feel like the old world that we're familiar with but with these new cryptoeconomic protocols under the hood and that is human readable crypto addresses as well as uncensorable domains so i've got my unstoppable domains account open here and i've got my domains registered and so i've got davidhoffman.crypto right and i have my one of my ethereum addresses pointed to it and i'm also going to be able to add my bitcoin address here as well because this is a blockchain agnostic product any wallet that has unstoppable domains integrated will allow you to type in

davidhoffman.crypto and if you're sending bitcoin or if you're sending eth or litecoin or hell even ripple it will send it to the address that i've associated on my account so i'm going to pull up my ether wallet here and i've loaded up an address with a small amount of eth and i'm going to send a little bit of eth to myself at davidhoffman.crypto it's going to populate with the ethereum address that it has but it's also linked to my twitter account because in unstoppable domains i've linked my twitter account to all of the addresses that i've plugged in and so chainlink is actually associating my twitter account with my ethereum address and you know these are the web 2 platforms that we have today but think about what happens when decentralized identity becomes more of a thing i'm sure unsolvable domains is

going to use decentralized identity solutions like bright id or circles to associate addresses with people in a extremely self-sovereign way unstoppable domains also allows you to spin up uncensorable websites which is i think going to become increasingly important in the world ahead of us using unstoppable domains you can purchase a website and use decentralized storage providers to host it as well meaning that no nation state can take down your website there is no cancelling in unstoppable domains world they even have templates ready to go to help you build out your first unstoppable domain so go to unstoppabledomains.com register your crypto addresses with a human readable name and maybe launch

your uncensorable website today zapper is this new tool that i use to check out all of my assets in d5 as you guys have known defy has absolutely exploded recently and so managing your assets is getting harder and harder because there's so many different places and so many different assets that it could be so i'm going to put my ethereum address in here and zapper is going to tell me where all of my assets are across ethereum right so here are all of the assets in this wallet uh there's there's a decent amount of them and it's also going to tell me where i've deposited assets into various d5 protocols right so there's some yield farming going on there's some liquidity pooling going on we can also look more granularly at the specific protocols

that it's involved with in this explore feature so it's got some assets deposited into uniswap it's got some assets deposited into balancer and also with zapper you can just exchange straight from the zapper interface right so this is just another layer on top of unit swap or other exchanges on ethereum that allow you to swap assets right so check them out at zapper.fi it'll give you a nice clean portal to invest your assets in d5 and you can also connect to multiple wallets if you use multiple wallets all at once and it'll give you an aggregate of every single wallet that you own check them out at zapper.fi also this is definitely not my wallet yeah i'd also love um you mentioned hardware wallets so i'd love to

talk a little bit about that too yeah please i'll come back to that in a minute but uh so so we've launched this new swaps product um it is it's funny i'll tell you the whole story of it so we started out with just the idea let's pick a dex aggregator um that pulls in a bunch of liquidity sources and bring that to metamask um so there's a few decks aggregators in the space um there's some really great ones and we went out and we actually we tried all of them and we did a study internally on on

which was the best one that we were gonna pick and we ended up with this split that was like all of these basically almost evenly compete with each other in different scenarios based on the order size based on the specific token based on their own unique approaches to gas and so a team member made this like weird app called aggregator aggregator um and i was actually just looking at an old screenshot of it but it took all of the dex aggregators and it pinged them individually and it allowed us to get the best

possible price for the user and then to route the order through the specific dex aggregator or direct decks that made the most sense for the user so um so we've rolled this out um now and and obviously it's it's a lot more robust and beautiful than the original uh aggregator aggregator was but uh so so we've rolled this out um we're aggregating uh many different dex aggregators we're aggregating apis that are not um as readily available to people we've also got uh private market makers who are providing liquidity to it as well

that wouldn't necessarily be available otherwise and we're uh we're we're bringing this to to end users um and trying to to really take that million monthly active users that you mentioned many of whom have never even done deck swaps like they onboarded into metamask to play games to to be a part of a community all kinds of different use cases and to make that feature set more available to them to make it more convenient and then also to give them confidence that when they make a deck swap that they're actually getting a fair price for

uh for the the um for for the swap so [Music] that uh that's now available today in firefox uh we're looking to roll it out to chrome very very shortly i think next week um plus or minus um and we'd love to bring this to you to mobile as well fantastic that was actually a youtube question um hey like when when is it gonna release other browsers so it sounds like next week for chrome uh it's fantastic news and jacob you wanted to say something about uh hardware um don't hold me to that date by the way

that's speculation and affirmation not user complex um but uh yeah um well i did did you want to talk ask me more about this we can go to the hardware wallets in a second i didn't well okay i guess so swap seems pretty straightforward but basically uh maybe to summarize and you can correct me if there's you know anything wrong you open the extension basically and within the metamask wallet itself there's some functionality that allows you to move from one asset to another and it gets you the best price using that aggregator of aggregators type of formula so i could move from eat to a die or a die to a you know wifey or something like that just with a couple

of clicks is that kind of it yeah yeah that's it that's a good summary so pretty cool the reason why i think this is such a big deal is because historically at least from what i've seen metamask has been a product that has pushed complexity out to the edges right it lets the websites take care of crazy logic and metamask just operates as this like coupler between your wallet and that website right and so this is like the first feature i've seen metamask rolled out roll out that has complexity on the inside of metamask right which is kind of a big step for metamask outside of its you know previous you know keep things simple on keep things simple and secure and then just you know make everything you know

ask the user for permission if they want things to be more complex um so what was the thought process with you know adding in complexity into metamask natively so i think the way that we think about it is we want to be a wallet that serves the whole ecosystem and the whole community uh first and we're definitely principally still focused on on being a universal wallet um that that has not changed uh really at all we're providing some additional like where we see clear adoption of a specific use case um where we can make it easier for people

to do we are bringing some of those features into the wallet um you mentioned swaps but there's also another example of that on mobile we actually launched an aggregator of on-ramps so a metamask mobile user can uh can purchase crypto through metamask mobile um and be routed through the appropriate on-ramp to the country that they're in so we're aggregating wire we're aggregating uh tranzact which is itself an aggregator of other on-ramps um and bringing those two together and so we're

trying to make it easier for people to get eth to get die and to do so in whatever country that they're based in um so i i think that uh you know we we want to make those kinds of things available um while principally we're still focused on serving the entirety of the ecosystem very good yeah so maybe jumping to that um hardware question so the reason this is i think important is you know the reason d5 super users love your product again is because it's so versatile it just works with everything but also if you are um doing things with larger capital amounts larger capital pools um you know

you're most comfortable probably holding your own keys on some sort of a hardware device or some sort of multi-sig right there might be a handful of smart contract wallets that um are mature enough to be trusted maybe a multi-uh gnosis multi-sig maybe um an argent wallet getting closer right but if it's large amounts the safest play place to to do it is is directly like self custody not a smart contract wallet we've seen you know issues like the parity hack in the past so um can you talk a little bit more about hardware support because that's been kind of a killer combination i know for many folks in the bank list community you take a hardware wallet like a ledger or a trezor and you combine that with metamask and now you have your own

self-sovereign banking interface and can do anything in d5 in a very secure way yeah so um so so thanks for that so a bunch of we have a bunch planned on the hardware wallet front and we're this has been one of the the most popular things that we do but it's also been uh [Music] one of the more finicky things in some ways because of third party apis so um a lot of the the a lot of hardware wallets were built around u2f and web hood which are apis that force or that they give the browser or the operating system in different

circumstances um the they're dependent on on those apis so in you'll have some some challenges for some users like on on windows there's there's annoying pop-ups to use those apis um so we're we're working together with the ledger team on a better a better flow for for that i don't have anything to announce yet but we'll have a much more versatile and universal solution there i believe um we also have a pull request that you can find where

metamask is potentially going to be supporting uh qr code based hardware wallets air gapped hardware wallets so we would love to you know someone can use a device that doesn't go online anymore an old phone without a sim card in it um you could use that as a hardware wallet and use the camera on your phone there's other hardware wallets that are coming out with cameras and screens that that are air gaps we'd love to be able to support a broader diversity of things and things that aren't dependent on third-party apis [Music] we're also coming out with a plug-in system

that is that's going to allow the addition of additional hardware wallets so any hardware wallet manufacturer will be able to add their hardware wallet to metamax through a snap snaps they get installed uh during the connect flow to a site so um you know the user could go out to the hardware wallet site um install a plug-in that that will allow support for that specific uh that specific hardware wallet use case and uh we'd love to lower the bar of entry for um for hardware wallets and we don't want to be the gatekeeper of which integrations are in metamask or

which ones are not so we're increasingly moving towards this uh sort of permissionless platform for for innovation and extension of metamask itself jacob one thing that really excites me is that metamask really offers this obfuscation layer which you know maybe in in different words it's kind of like this user aggregation layer where you guys are at least with this swap with this new swap feature you guys are the aggregator of aggregators right and so there's a lot of d5 protocols that are operating behind the scenes to make the metamask swap feature work right so you know metamask looks to uni-swap for its price it looks to dex ag for its price

when dexag looks at kyber for its price to me what i'm seeing is a manifestation of the protocol sync thesis which if you're familiar the protocol sync thesis is protocols that are just you know operate as infrastructure agnostic credibly neutral infrastructure fall down to the bottom and then surface layer surface level uh interfaces things like like metamask tap into those protocols in order to offer services to its users and what you guys are doing is really clever is you're adding on a 0.875 fee onto the swap for it to add to that service which to my knowledge is metamask's first big step into actual monetization of the product um from from what i can tell so are there few uh future uh like kind of um

you know value added features that you guys are thinking about where you guys also take take your guys's uh your your fee your cut to help support the metamask business and maybe grow this thing into something you know massive is are there future products coming down the line that kind of fit in the same pattern yeah so we don't have any other value-added services to announce yet with the exception of uh the the other one that i um the other one that i mentioned was the the on-ramp aggregator so we have that on mobile today um we make a small revenue from that as well um and uh we've historically had just wire

um and and a couple other uh solutions on the extension but so the the two ways that we do make money are from the on-ramp aggregator and from the swaps teacher um the i i don't know what the the long-term pricing of the swaps feature will be um we we had originally announced a um 0.3 percent to a 0.875 percent uh depending on swap size and different things like that we haven't rolled out the dynamic pricing to uh to the to the firefox version yet and we're looking at a lot of data thinking about uh what the the best uh the best

way to approach it is we we did intentionally set um we did a lot of research on how much money we were going to be saving people and so it varies a lot depending on swap size depending on different scenarios but we've seen swaps where we're saving people five percent um we're we're able to really save the end user a lot of money um and it varies a lot based on the order size based on different scenarios but we feel really good that we have a really strong value proposition and that we're saving people uh saving people money we're not trying to do this as like fee collectors it's not just like i mean convenience is

a part of it but we want to give people confidence that they're getting the best swap price um and so our our fees are sort of built around that very cool all right i want to talk about this uh this last maybe major feature set that we're starting to see roll-ups actually come into existence in a big way in d5 even starting to see ethereum roll-ups actually projects deploy in ethereum roll-ups first before they deploy on mainnet which is super exciting right now in metamask you can kind of you know change from mainnet to add test net um to you know something like ribson or or or some other test net uh very easily yeah x die and just like a click of a button is

that is that can you do the same thing for a roll up let's say this optimism roll up with synthetics and with uniswap comes into existence will will that be you know able to natively plug into metamask as easy as a click of a button and you're on this new network so uh so all all so a few things that we have announced today um there's lots of lots of things to talk about but uh so we've announced our plug-in system uh late last year there was a developer preview of the plug-in system that's available today and that can support both evm compatible custom blockchains and

it can support um not an evm compatible custom blockchains uh layer twos like um for example starkware you can't just add starkware as a custom network today um you you need a you need a wallet that's compatible with its team name so we're building this plugin system that allows the user during the connect flow to a site to add a custom blockchain and to uh to to have that as a part of their metamouse wallet um there's a lot of security things that we're figuring out with it um we're we're also uh we're doing some some

other uh some some other exciting stuff um with uh complementary blockchains uh they're being used for file storage so yesterday you might have seen uh got announced that filecoin uh is is doing us a plug-in and snap together with metamask so you'll be able to do data storage and stuff like that from from metamask so we we really want metamouse to be deeply extensible and to allow the developer community to start ex extending what metamask can do um we also we want to have contract account apis

so a wallet developer of a specific contract account standard can can create a contract account wallet uh you can import your contract account wallet into metamouse so even if you were using a different um you know using a specific contract account um say like a gnosis multisig for instance yeah exactly um you'd be able to import that um with the plug-in system um so we're we're really committed to that it's it's very important to us it is technically challenging um we're doing a lot of really interesting stuff with security as well to make to make it work so we've got this product

uh it's a library called lava mode that sandboxes all of the open source dependencies to the wallet so we're really excited and proud of that we take security extremely seriously and so we're doing a lot of innovation in the space um lava mode also uses something called cess or or security script which is a javascript sandboxing method um the um in in terms of what we'll also have some other um some other announcements short of the of snaps uh to announce in in the coming few

weeks but i'm not ready yet it sounds like you guys have a ton of stuff in the back pocket yes absolutely well that's great well um jacob thanks so much for your time it's been a pleasure to have you there's so much more we could get into we haven't even talked about like infuria and or metamask token or other future things but uh we'd love to have you guys back on stay the nation to talk more about that as those exciting announcements come in uh thanks for thanks for joining us so jacob yeah thank you guys so much that uh that token one is a very popular request so anyway um thank you guys so much and i i really appreciate it oh fantastic

take care jacob all right david now this is the point time where i'm supposed to announce uh sponsors basically so to the sponsors that made this possible thank you very much we're going to show a little bit about their tools in just a second here and then we'll be back talking to lucas campbell about the q3 token report that we just you three token report stay tuned here we go