MetaMask Girds for Crypto Winter by learning from the latest

From our humble beginnings as a pair of star-studded technicians eager to make a name for themselves in a whole new industry, it’s hard to believe how far MetaMask has come in the last six years. Although this anniversary is worth celebrating, we also want to reflect on MetaMask’s growth and how our journey has shaped the ethos of this project.

Our shared history dates back to 2013 when we both worked on an open source project called VoxelJS. We then worked in a startup called MochaLeaf, which was acquired by Apple. We were linked to a project called VoxelJS. It was a software engine that allows you to create Minecraft-type browser games. Over the next few years, we worked on other areas, including peer-to-peer networking, and came up with a whole bunch of crazy, ambitious ideas to change the world.

We were both attracted to many of the concepts that swirled around the crypto space, especially with the convergence of technology, politics and data sovereignty. Ideas such as creating more efficient and participatory governance systems and being able to democratize the distribution of wealth seemed daring and exciting.

2016-2020 – The Bootstrapped Years

When Ethereum was launched in 2015, giving rise to ideas such as DAO and alternative currencies, we knew we wanted to dive in first, but none of the infrastructure was in place to support our vision. And so the idea of ​​MetaMask, as a kind of account administrator running in your browser, was born.

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We knew that the realization of this new concept with web3 would be conditional on having infrastructure that was built in a sustainable and well-managed way. It had to be distributed and resilient, as well as open and participatory.

Aaron put together the first version, which was a pretty sophisticated “browser-in-browser” tool, just to get Dan to come along and remove the whole thing for a simple web extension. What we ended up with after several rounds of back and forth was about good enough to start getting developers to notice us at events and hackathons. And then MetaMask was born in 2016.

Within a year we had hired our first couple of developers, but it was not enough to handle the flow of demand we saw during the ICO boom in 2017. As enthusiastic users rushed in to try out this new platform, we all pulled -nighters and the infrastructure and security requirements of the platform were constantly strained.

Of course, the bullish sentiments quickly disappeared after the market highs around the 2017 holiday. Like many other founders, we took the opportunity to spin during the crypto winter and focus on building our platform.

In 2018, we held a retreat and began discussing scaling of MetaMask by allowing users to add networks other than Ethereum. In 2019, the Snaps project was underway, giving developers the opportunity to safely expand the capabilities of MetaMask for their dApps.

At this time, we were not really a revenue-generating project. We survived financially thanks to the support of ConsenSys and Joe Lubin, who believed in our vision and motivation as founders, and in society’s willingness to participate in what we were trying to build.

So when March 2020 hit and the bottom fell out of the crypto market, we feared running out of runway. Times were difficult for the ecosystem. We strapped on, continued to build, and later that year we sent the replacement function. With this launch, we finally had a sustainable revenue model that would allow the company to start growing with an increased focus on serving users.

2020-2022 – Expanding utility, star growth

As things turned out, 2020 was a year of epic heights as well as crippling downturns. During the summer, the seeds of the DeFi sector that were sown in the last two years began to bear fruit.

The Compound launch of the COMP token drove the DAO movement, and over the past two years, the growth rate of the entire crypto sector has been almost inexorably groundbreaking.

Having an established product that solved a number of key requirements for the ecosystem at the start of the DeFi summer, MetaMask positioned itself as the primary gateway to the exploding market within decentralized return-generating platforms. The emergence of NFTs and games to earn blockchain games in 2021 made MetaMask valuable to a new global group of users.

By August 2021, we had passed ten million monthly active users, making MetaMask the world’s number one non-custodian cryptocurrency wallet. Now in 2022, with the potential of web3 and the meta verse still in its infancy, we have already passed 30 million monthly active users.

We have constantly focused on developing our team strategically, and as a result we have never been better organized to systematically address roadmaps and user needs.

There are countless exciting integrations along the way for MetaMask users, but we have been very careful not to tailor our efforts to primarily serve one crop of dapps or use cases. Our mission is to best serve the vast wealth of potential ideas that developers and users will build and engage with as the tools become simpler and better.

Our roadmap is probably as ambitious as it may be at this point – and perhaps some of our goals may end up being a little too eager – but the versatility of a value-for-money distributed wallet has never been clearer.

Bear Markets and Beyond

Having survived and thrived through more than one market cycle, we feel quite undisturbed by the bear market in 2022, especially given the epic leaps forward we’ve seen over the last six years or even the last two.

Just like the crypto winter of 2018 and 2019, the new generation of web3 developers is building, and we see previews of how the landscape will change over the next cycle, providing improvements in privacy, interoperability, security and user experience.

Furthermore, as web3 develops and becomes operational, we believe that the market cycles of cryptocurrencies will be less disruptive to our many use cases. It is clear that even during this bear market, many users continue to rely on MetaMask for purposes unrelated to investment or financing, such as gaming, social media, identity, art, collaboration or other types of transactions.

So, as relatives of elders in the crypto community, we remain very optimistic about the future. The bear market can be maintained for a while, but people have had a taste of owning their own digital contracts and assets, and that momentum goes nowhere, and neither is MetaMask.

Here are another six years of building the basic infrastructure that we hope will continue to enable society to harness the power of distributed cryptographic systems. And thanks to the millions of passionate people around the world who have made all of this possible by embarking on this journey with us.

Aaron Davis and Dan Finlay are co-founders of MetaMask.