Conversation with MetaMask founder Dan Finlay: MetaMask will become Web3 Google

Dan Finlay is the co-founder of MetaMask, one of the main wallets for people to interact with Web3. In Dan's conversation with Camila Russo, we'll take an in-depth look at Dan before he became a co-founder of MetaMask, where he sees MetaMask going in the next few years, their privacy policy, a potential MASK token, Dan's thoughts on the next bull run expect, wait. First, Dan will talk about the origin of MetaMask.

Get started: How MetaMask got started

Dan Finlay: I was working at Apple with my friend Aaron Davis, and he saw Vitalik talk about Ethereum at a Bitcoin meetup. And then we started talking about it every day at lunch—like, what would we do if we had a computer that could run transparently and be trusted. I did some experiments before this, and I wanted to provide micropayments for Reddit likes, and I wanted to implement decentralized voting. I've been following a number of projects that aim to decentralize democracy or debate, and all of these applications have problems with building trust. So some project ideas that I was excited about popped up right away; because it was like, "Oh, a trustworthy computer might solve these problems." So we were very excited, trying to figure out how to build applications on Ethereum. The first thing that was needed was an account manager, so we set out to work towards that. It turns out that building a good account manager on a permissionless, scalable, and Turing-complete computer that is still struggling to scale and preserve privacy is a much larger project than we originally anticipated.

But it's clearly a very important component of a successful decentralized ecosystem. I think we have gradually entered a new product category ourselves.

Camila Russo: Very interesting. So initially MetaMask was primarily seen as an account manager. So how did that vision change over time to become what we see today?

Dan: Yeah, I think it started as an account manager. In Ethereum, an account is the fundamental unit of all authority. I think the Ethereum protocol is still insisting that the account is the basic unit. But in the beginning, all accounts are just private keys, because people don't have a proper set of smart contracts and tools to build smart contracts to use and manifest. As a result, we gradually see increasingly complex, evolving patterns. I think the future will be democracy, or something like multisig. But it took us a while to mature the options to the point where we were talking more about how best to combine the pieces and enable people to combine them themselves than whether we could make it happen.

Therefore, account management is still our main job now; but at the same time, managing the assets in the account is equally important. These assets can be fungible tokens or non-fungible tokens. And people also manage various things in their accounts, which can be tokens (Token) or NFT (non-homogeneous tokens); such as voting, streaming payment, game assets, and The interaction of smart contracts, or smart contracts that people have, and so on. So it's an increasingly generic digital inventory where people save the kinds of things they can do on the web that allow them to connect to other sites and use the same authority in new contexts.

Past: Dan's Personal History

Camila: I would love to know more about your background, for example, how did you get involved with Ethereum?

Dan: Well, what I just said was definitely my first exposure to Ethereum. Then, we can't build anything on Ethereum until there's an account manager, so that's important. I'm not sure (what you mean), would you like me to review previous projects that got me interested in this sort of thing?

Camila: Yes, how did you get into crypto? Where did you work before and what were you doing?

Dan: I remember the original bitcoin faucet post that came up on Slashdot, I tried it, got some bitcoins maybe, and then lost that wallet. But didn't really understand it back then. At one point, I did some freelance work and got some bitcoins, and after school I did a lot of freelance work. I graduated in a recession. So at that time I did a lot of weird jobs.

Camila: As a software engineer, or...

Dan: No, I was teaching myself to write software during that time. I'm an English Literature graduate and it's been hard to find a job that interests me. If I just wanted to be an English teacher, it might be easy, but that's not what I want. So I just do a lot of weird stuff. I've started a screen printing company, taught computers at an art center, and more.

After college, I took a lot of weird, random jobs looking for things that meant something to me. And it happens that computers are very interesting, so the ideas in many different projects inevitably lead me to computers. It's a very empowering thing - to be able to program an idea of yours and then share it with the world, I don't know of any other skill that has such a high level of leverage. More and more things, like podcasting and video production, have a similar digital amplification effect. This is really cool. I don't think YouTube was what I was interested in back then. So at the time, writing an app was still the most powerful, permissionless digital skill that required just an idea and some effort to reach a massive audience.

Camila: That's amazing. So your degree is in English Literature and you taught yourself programming. What programming language did you start with?

Dan: Partly depends on what you count as a language, because I've written some mods for StarCraft. But... I don't know if people would count it as a language, it's more of a visual custom scripting language or something. Later, I used MIT's Scratch to teach video game design, which is also a visual building block tool. We also did some macro media fusion. I think at some point these tools are no longer sufficient for my needs. I needed the ability to do anything, so I started learning Objective C for iOS development. I think Objective C was the first pure programming language I ever learned. But I come from a literary background and to me these are just words, they are always expressive. I think of Excel as a programming environment. And this has been seen more and more by everyone, right? If you can explain well what you want, AI can now program it for you, as long as you can express the need very well. So I think the line between a programming language and the ability to express intent for a computer to execute is getting blurred. So it's less and less about remembering where to put semicolons, and more and more about whether you have some meaningful ideas.

Camila: So interesting. Then I guess you started to learn Solidity to develop MetaMask application?

Dan: Yes, I learned a little Solidity to make my own decentralized applications. But in fact, even today, most of MetaMask's code is still written in Java. I've written Solidity code for a few often side projects. In many ways, from the beginning, MetaMask has been such a product: it has allowed me to build on top of it what I want. I still feel like it does. Like, MetaMask helps me when I start a new side project on the weekends. There are a lot of things that could be fixed by making a technology like MetaMask more accessible, and I don't think it's there yet. For example, one of the questions that came to my mind recently is about honest mechanics: you take your car to the garage and always wonder, is this mechanic worth trusting? Is this a good repairman? You always rely on recommendations from friends. If you go to Yelp, you never know if the reviews are spammed, or if they're hiding some reviews...inconsistencies like that. Building trust and reputation is very difficult. It must be harder for an honest repairman. So I think that's a big need in this area, and there must be a lot of other similar needs in other areas, right? Finding a trustworthy, honest person to help yourself is one of the great struggles of our society. There is still a long way to go before we can make this easy and safe.

Camila: How do you see MetaMask playing a role in this? Will MetaMask become a repairman that people can trust?

Dan: No, I mean, it's fine if people trust us, mutual trust between people is a great thing; but we're not mechanics, and we don't know local mechanics. So actually, I think MetaMask is acknowledging more and more that we're not a trusted third party, but rather a tool for you to trust what you want to trust. Also, the original promise of blockchain is that you don't need to trust anyone. It's true, you can hold some cryptocurrency and attack it very expensive. But again, when you interact with a new smart contract, you put some tokens in, you give it some authorization, there is still some trust dependency. We try to make it as transparent as possible, but at the end of the day, there will always be something to trust. So our mission is to let you build your digital trust network. Eventually, it should even extend to everything including the local economy. It should be more than just smart contracts. If we had an increasingly rich comprehensive financial trust graph, we should be able to analyze the various signals in it, including who are the local repairmen you can trust, and what is the cheapest way for you to buy a certain item, etc. .

MetaMask Long Term Vision

Camila: So, please talk a little bit more about the larger long-term vision of MetaMask. What will MetaMask look like in 20 years?

Dan: In 20 years? If all goes well, or if the climate collapses... I mean, we should seriously consider the fact that many of the planet's resources are facing serious damage. So I think people will increasingly need stable ways to connect to the resources they depend on. I live in California and the drought is getting worse here. There has been some rain this year.

But, at the end of the day, we need tools that say, "Look, here's what I need, and I need to find this. Here's what I can provide, and here's what I need."

I see this as a need-matching solution tool that could become the ultimate goal of wallets or decentralized finance. You have something to offer the world. You're trying to figure out what to do and what you can do that best aligns with what you want to do and achieve your personal goals.

So, we don't know exactly what those ledgers will look like 20 years from now. we do not know. They've come a long way, we're getting better scalability, cheaper verification, we're starting to get more and more privacy options, although legal status seems to have been a point of friction. But I think we're going to continue to move toward the way people need to connect, post those offers to the internet, and then have more and more sophisticated digital intermediaries. It's clear that your phone is going to be an increasingly sophisticated AI. It's probably going to be scouring the web all the time for good opportunities for you, like: "Hey, someone here needs your gardening services, and they can provide us with..." I believe that in a downturn, local currencies become more and more valuable. Therefore, being able to accept and value increasingly localized currencies is a key component of surviving recessions and depressions.

So when you get the solution tool for needs matching, it evaluates what you can offer the world, and what you hope to get out of it. It will work hard to get the best bang for your buck. So it might suggest part-time jobs to you, it might suggest opportunities to you, it might point you to contacts in your social network that you can introduce each other to, like: "Hey, this person is looking for a roofer, you know A good one, would you vouch for them?" When you endorse people, you get a commission.

So I think this technology will move toward a privacy-first, localism-first economy, where people will be rewarded for helping to make connections and identify economic cycles, and that will bring continued commonality in interactions between both parties. Benefit.

Camila: What you describe is much broader than our current understanding of Web3 wallets. MetaMask is a place where you can store your different assets. It is a way to interact and access different Web3 DApps. I think it's seen as the gateway to cryptocurrencies and Web3. More recently, it also allows you to make exchanges within your wallet. But what you describe goes way beyond that. What you describe is more like Google: it lets you find what you want, and even recommends places, services, or things that might be useful. Yes, this looks very different from MetaMask now. Interesting.

Dan: Yes. There is one key difference from what Google is doing: Google is trying to solve these problems in a relatively global way. So, if you type "auto mechanic," it might ask where you are, and it might incorporate your past search history. But it doesn't incorporate completely private, personal social network-type information. At MetaMask, we try to build a user-centric, cryptography-led user agent. So if we say, your wallet ends up helping you find a good repairman, well, you probably don't search your wallet for a repairman. You might go to a website and connect your wallet. Then the wallet or the website might say, "Hey, in order to recommend someone in your social graph, I need to access some social graph information." Hopefully we can do that in a privacy-preserving, selective-disclosure way . But this is a completely open innovation challenge for cryptography. For example, what is the most private and consent-respecting way to interact with the web? But we don't want to disrupt the growth of the Internet. The web is full of human creativity, and it's only going to get more interesting, especially with all this AI technology. However, AI is still only working with public data.

We're in a weird tension between wanting the benefits of AI helping us in every way and needing to keep some sort of privacy or domain that's close to you, because then you can Holding assets so they can't be taken away or completely controlled by someone else is how you maintain a competitive edge in the world, right private information may be at the heart of what allows you to make unique decisions in the world . So, yeah, I guess you're right, it's kind of like Google, because I do think user agents like MetaMask should eventually help you do various things. It's part of the cryptocurrency space that tries to help people make decisions in a way that doesn't hand over all the power to service providers.

Camila: So what's interesting about what you said is that blockchain can help enable a more user-centric, or more localized, more personalized search engine, like Google.

Dan: Of course, not just the blockchain, but a series of decentralized protocols. Some may be blockchain-based assets, others may be counterfactual claims or verifiable credentials. But it's really a collection of protocols where we can apply cryptography so that users can have their own local agent that holds keys for you and tries to act on your behalf. So what would such a network look like where you could control more of your content and share that control more carefully?

BALANCE OF PRIVACY

Camila: You mentioned privacy issues. Concerns have been raised recently about MetaMask sharing user IP addresses. I think because of Infura, and then you have to disclose this information. So how do you handle these requests? How do you add privacy to an app like MetaMask in a completely public space? How to achieve balance?

Dan: When we first developed MetaMask, Infura was one of the key design tradeoffs we made in order to make the entire platform easier to use for new users. I think the general feeling is that this was a good decision because it means it's easier to get started. Today, there are many barriers to participating in the cryptocurrency space, and if everyone had to run a full node of Ethereum, I think we would be far behind where we are now. Maybe we could have accelerated the development of the client, but we weren't ready then. So we provide a trusted way to get data, and some parts of Infura's infrastructure keep some logs, and we feel a duty to immediately disclose this privacy practice, and at the same time figure out how to clean up that infrastructure. I think we underestimated the public backlash to this disclosure. It's perceived as a policy change: we now monetize user data, maybe even sell it, and distribute it in all sorts of cryptic ways. I don't think that's true at all, we're just disclosing how our internal infrastructure works. Fortunately, in response to the outcry, we have made reasonable improvements to this system, and we no longer store IP addresses for more than five days. I know we're getting better, but we're still waiting for a more positive statement on this topic.

In the long run, the solution should not be to make us more trustworthy. Of course, the solution should be for us to gradually use protocols that allow you to not have to trust third parties. It's not just our problem, it's an ecosystem problem. There are many solutions on the market that offer varying degrees of privacy improvement. We'd very much like to have a solution that is robust enough. At the same time, we are always configurable, and users can choose the source of the Ethereum blockchain connection according to their needs. You can self-host or use someone else's service. We are evaluating our own potential solutions. Infura is also working on a decentralized version. There is still a long way to go before people don't need to trust an entity, but we are working hard to develop a tool that allows users to make decisions and trade-offs based on their needs based on the options currently available. Today's options are getting better and better.

Camila: OK. But what's interesting is that since disclosing how the infrastructure works, you've made a change to only store IP address information for five days now?

Dan: Right, and we never associate IP addresses with user accounts, which is another important thing. Not in the past, and not now. Wait, definitely not now, but I need to go back and check with my colleagues. So I think the biggest privacy concerns have been mitigated. If people want to be more cautious, they can run their own infrastructure. We will continue to work hard to make better progress. However, with progress, trade-offs are always inevitable.

The Rise of Smart Wallets

Camila: What do you think of some emerging smart contract wallets? Such as Gnosis, Rainbow and Argent and so on. They seem to have improved in terms of user experience, such as easier account recovery, possibly simplified confirmation of some gas bills, etc. These smart wallets do a great job of removing some of the weird parts of the Web3 experience. However, it seems that MetaMask still needs a certain foundation to use freely, and many interfaces are still quite complicated. So, do you see smart contract wallets as competitors? Are you guys developing your own smart contract wallet, or considering adding some similar functionality to MetaMask?

Dan: Yes, there are a lot of cool things happening in the smart contract account space. I think that with the development of technologies such as EIP: 4337, the use of smart contract accounts will be more convenient, and users can entrust transaction payments to other mechanisms, such as other tokens or payers, which is very meaningful. Therefore, in the long run, account management should not be limited to the holding of private keys. MetaMask was the first Web3 wallet, so many of our accounts are using the oldest technology. As we develop, we need to make some trade-offs while maintaining continuity for existing users. It was a tough call, but that doesn't mean we're not interested in developing smart contract accounts.

In fact, we think there is huge room for smart contract accounts and other similar technologies to grow. They can be nicely combined to implement multi-signatures to implement 2-step verification for your accounts, simultaneously as one of the multi-signatures in an organization, or for voting in a larger decentralized autonomous organization. Therefore, we hope to not be limited to just one account paradigm. While features like social recovery are excellent, innovation at the protocol level continues. For example, current smart contract accounts still have deficiencies in terms of financial privacy. Therefore, we can clearly see that the final stage has not been reached yet.

MetaMask has been investing in creating infrastructure for continued growth in the account management space. For the past three years, we've been working on a scalability project called Snaps. One goal of the Snaps system is to enable users to plug in other account managers. So, if you have a Safe or Argent account, you should be able to connect them directly to MetaMask. In fact, most users using Safe today are signing Safe transactions with MetaMask. There is already a lot of healthy interoperability between these tools. Things will get more and more interesting as we keep simplifying the integration of these different account models.

And I don't think it's just an account with a complex recovery scheme. We also want users to be able to deploy limited-privilege tools or session keys when logging into the site. These are not just questions about owning accounts, but often questions about how to assign permissions reasonably. We increasingly believe that users shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket, and I've never suggested that. Current users have at least one cold wallet and one hot wallet, but we hope to make it easier for ordinary users to spread assets according to their needs. Maybe they can restore all assets using a social recovery scheme, but it should still be easy for users to provision a new device, use that device to log into a website, or even use that device to provision other devices. Therefore, we believe there is still much room for improvement in terms of improving account models and asset management. So we pay more attention to long-term development. While today's smart contract accounts already demonstrate a superior user experience, in the long run, in order to be able to interact with any type of account on any website, on any chain, we need to fundamentally rethink what is in your computer What it means to hold digital rights.

Camila: You think smart contract accounts look great and very useful, but you don’t think this is the end of development for account management. You think there may be more room for improvement at the protocol layer, which is what MetaMask is exploring, right?

Dan: There's a lot of room for improvement, at least in terms of privacy, and probably scalability. Since there is still room for improvement, we want to build a wallet where users can try and improve more features. Therefore, we don't think we will be able to work out the final contract account at the beginning. We invested in a lab where we and other developers could iterate and try other models. We are excited about the current smart contract accounts as they allow us to validate a futuristic user experience flow. But we also want to note that we still hope that there are many areas that can be improved, and we don't want to just bet the fate of the next ten years on one set of features. For example, while Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending is awesome, it’s not the only thing we want users to be able to do.

Next Milestone

Camila: What is the next big milestone for MetaMask? Recently, I've seen you announce partnerships with some fiat-to-crypto services. Is this an important part of the map going forward? What is your biggest milestone along the way?

Dan: MetaMask will continue to improve recharge channels, making it easier for users in more and more regions to obtain their first cryptocurrency. Additionally, we will continue to improve the portfolio view in the main wallet. Portfolio view is getting better and better, already supports bridge function, and of course exchange operation, and view overview of all accounts. Therefore, we will continue to work hard to improve the ease of performing common operations.

At the same time, we are still developing the entire scalability system. This year, we hope to launch the Snap system and its first APIs in the next quarter. This will start a phase in which more protocols will be supported by the MetaMask wallet. These protocols include not only more blockchain protocols, but potentially entirely new ways of interacting. Not every protocol is a blockchain, some might be selective disclosure protocols, verifiable voucher protocols, or automated trading bots, etc. We are very much looking forward to seeing what kind of innovative experiments people will come up with. All the experiments we've seen so far have been very interesting.

So, in addition to making bridging, swapping, and staking features that users have come to expect easier to integrate together, our biggest milestone for the next year may be making it easy for users to integrate their preferred protocols and account types directly into their wallets .

Camila: Very cool. So that's the Snap product. This will be an API that allows other decentralized applications (DApps) and protocols to connect to MetaMask, is that right?

Dan: And the ability to extend it. In this way, users may add new account types to their wallets, such as bitcoin account types, allowing users to hold bitcoins and ordinary NFTs in their wallets. Or, it might let users connect to Disco's data backpacks to take user profiles to different sites across the web. This will start to expand the utility of the wallet and allow us to start plugging in other types of accounts. Once we find some exciting account types, we can start recommending these to users, making it easier for users to use a secure model that fits their needs.

Camila: In this way, MetaMask can realize the multi-chain function.

Dan: Yeah, one of the challenges of supporting multiple chains is that there seems to be a new blockchain every week. We are not experts on every blockchain, and we believe that a wallet that supports a blockchain should be proficient in that chain. So instead of trying to be a jack-of-all-trades ourselves, we would rather open it up to the community and let it be driven by community participation. We hope to find a system where experts in different protocols feel that building modules within MetaMask is worth their time.

MeatMask Tokens?

Camila: This field seems to be suitable for issuing tokens?

Dan: I guess tokens can fit into any space.

Camila: You just mentioned incentives for builders, so I think it may be more suitable to issue tokens.

Dan: Yeah, you're not the first to say that.

Camila: There is always speculation about MetaMask's token MASK. Do you have any news or plans on the roadmap on this issue?

Dan: People know about a token that has never been released, which is amazing.

Camila: Yeah, people are excited, they've decided to call it MASK.

Dan: Although there is already a token called MASK, it seems like we can force our way in. Regarding the MetaMask token, we don't have any announcements to make today, sorry.

MetaMask for Institutions

Camila: Also, I'd like to get an update on MetaMask's institutional grade product. As far as I know, there is a MetaMask for institutions. how to use it What's the latest news about this product?

Dan: Yes, the MetaMask Institutional Grade product allows for custodial key managers, offering customized versions of MetaMask for institutions with specific custodial needs. This allows these institutions to better meet their needs while still being able to use the convenience that MetaMask offers Function. This is very attractive to institutions looking for higher security and custody requirements in the blockchain space.

This is cool because it allows us to try a slightly different set of features within the product for these customers. And this way we always have the potential to validate a feature, and if the feature is good enough or meets the requirements, we can introduce it into the consumer version of MetaMask. At present, MetaMask already has a large number of custodians and users, and is building a unique feature set to meet the needs of non-crypto-native institutional crypto investors.

Camila: Who are these institutional users?

Dan: I can't say it now, sorry. Partly because we have another team working on it so I can focus on the core wallet product. I'm sorry for the agency team lol.

Camila: No, that’s right, I’m thinking about institutions like big banks or hedge funds, or more like cryptocurrency venture capital firms, or I just want to know the type of users. But it's okay if you don't have this information right now.

Dan: Those names are not big bank names to me. Feel sorry.

User active data

Camila: Okay, it's okay. I would like to know some recent activity numbers like how many users use MetaMask. Has the number of active users declined recently in this bear market? What are some recent figures on recent trends?

Dan: Regarding user activity, I think at the peak last year (2022), we reached about 30 million monthly active users. Then at the start of the bear market, we saw it drop by roughly half, and it's held steady since then.

So there's a sense of following the usual cycle we've seen, where the bull market attracts a lot of new people. Then when the market crashed, about half of them left, but some of them stayed. So it has a sort of escalating effect. Bear markets do hurt, especially for the late entrants, who are often the least expected and least aware of what they are doing. But I think it reflects an ongoing process that we've also seen a few times before. Now there are about 15 million monthly active users.

Camila: So it hit 30 million at its peak. But do you know how many users there are before the bull market starts, say in 2020?

Dan: In 2020? I think it was much less then, maybe a few million. We grew 10x in the last bull market.

Camila: Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people didn't realize when the bear market started. A sharp pullback like we saw from the peak. But if we go back to where we were before the bull market started, that's still a huge increase. I think you see this in both Web3 and encryption.

Dan: Even though we lost 15 times more users than we did at the beginning of the year, it still hurts. Sounds like it can't happen lol.

Swap product: 99% success rate

Camila: Regarding your Swap product, how is it performing? Can you disclose how much revenue it generates and how many exchanges there are?

Dan: I don't want to look at the dashboard while chatting. I don't know if this is impolite...

Camila: It's okay.

Dan: In fact, the amount that people exchange is much lower than during the bull market. If the bull market lasted forever, we'd be perfectly safe. Not anymore. Yes, if the bear market continues indefinitely, we need to find other sources of income. So we're trying to figure out what else value we can bring to the user. We always make sure the product is free by default and preserves all user rights as much as possible. So it's an ongoing question of what can we offer that isn't overly tough but also makes life easier for users and maybe gets them a better deal based on their own research and also helps our Wallet development. So Swap performed very well. People who use it absolutely love it. It is probably the most reliable Swap contract on the Ethereum mainnet. I don't think we publicize this enough. You know, we try to make it the best deal for people. We do charge a fee, which reduces the savings for you. However, if reliability is a concern, I think it's sane for most users. And I do use it too. So I think it's pretty good. I think the success rate is about 99%.

Progress: Build more features

Camila: What additional useful features are you considering adding?

Dan: We are currently working on blockchain bridging. If you visit our portfolio dapp (portfolio.metamask.io), you will see that we offer some bridge aggregations already curated. So if you want to go from Ethereum mainnet to Optimism, we have a few different routes for you to choose from. At that time, we will recommend you the best rates for transferring tokens between chains. This is hard work because we have to make sure we can find a chain we trust for every connection between chains. But so far it seems to work very well, and the reliability is high. So it seems like we can give users the freedom to choose which blockchain bridge they want to use. But if we can make the whole process easier and save them money at the same time, it will be worth it for users to use our method.

Camila: Very interesting. Starting from the blockchain bridge, MetaMask will help users perform operations on other chains, right?

Dan: Yeah, we're looking at what we can uniquely help users do. Apparently, this is something that a lot of people are doing. But our mission is to make sure that users are free to do whatever they want in decentralized finance, and then try to provide services while they're doing all these innovative activities.

Camila: In the current bear market, what kind of applications do you want developers to build? What would you like to see in the decentralized finance or cryptocurrency space?

Dan: Oh, I would like to see many, many things built. I'm working with a team called District Labs on a Delegatable delegation framework and I'm very excited about it. We also have some collaborators (LXDAO) working on an anti-phishing project called MobyMask. I'd love to see more delegation tools, it's important but underutilized right now. Now we have some great decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) tools that can centralize pools of funds and make decisions as a team. But DAOs often only make big decisions as a team. I think if we had better DAO delegation tools, you could do more things like have a subcommittee empowered to make decisions within a certain size or budget. Subcommittees can even delegate powers to individuals. I think of delegation as a tool for leveraging existing trust to increase efficiency, speed, and dynamic agency capabilities. So while blockchain has proven to be great for trustless things, I would like to see more selective trust tools. We’ve seen a lot of decentralized finance applications where you can borrow trustlessly or do trustless liquidity mining.

I'd like to see more tools that let people do real things with digital currencies, like starting small businesses or crowdfunding real projects. I'd love to see something that provides people with a slightly better deal that replaces the current sharing economy apps.

A bear market is a great time to build. A lot of the constant stress about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is gone, so you can take a step back and think about what the hell we're building for. The world needs a lot of coordination and to improve the existing coordination. So I think pick a problem that you see in the real world and try to imagine how you would solve it and what is holding you back. If blockchain can help solve these problems, go build those parts.

Future: The Next Bull Market

Camila: Of course. If all of this is happening in a bear market, what big new thing do you think will emerge in the next bull market? NFTs were a big thing in the past, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) were a big thing before that. So what do you think the next big thing will be?

Dan: If all these things are realized, all these things are built, then I think the next bull market will focus on real world problems and needs.

Camila: This would be great.

Dan: So, instead of just investing in a token and hoping it yields more, it's pooling our capital and putting it into practice for real-world outcomes that we think matter. This is the ultimate test.

Camila: Best wishes. If we can actually achieve a bull market based on real-world applications, great. Dan, this chat was very interesting, thank you so much for taking the time to connect with me. I am very much looking forward to the huge vision of MetaMask. I was completely unaware of this vision of localized and personalized Google similar to Web3, which is very interesting. Thanks again, it's a pleasure.