This is epicenter episode 446 where the guests than Finlay.
Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the
Technologies projects and people with driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. I am fig Rica Anton.
I'm here with special. Guest co-host, Felix lunch.
Today. We're speaking with Dan Finlay,
who is the founder and group manager of meta mask.
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today. Then it's an absolute pleasure
to have you on Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I've been a fan of epicenter for so long.
I'm just delighted to be here. Hmm, then so, we go way back to
Tia, you know, to my consensus days.
So, tell us about yourself and how you got into the blockchain
universe. Ah, well, I guess I, I'll try to
keep it brief, but with a little taste of why it caught my eye,
you know, like sure I got paid for in Bitcoin for a An odd job
one time and I was cool, but I lost it about docks and it
didn't really catch my attention.
I mean, I saw the slashdot article when it first came out,
and I thought it'd be cool. I did not learn how it worked.
I went to the faucet. I have no idea how much that
would have been worth. I definitely don't have that
anymore. And then when I was working at
Apple with my friend who Mabus, he went to a meet-up and and
started talking to well, a friend of his of ours, A Dominic
tar. Our who is the creator of
scuttlebutt? We'd met him through the node,
the node js community and he was really into decentralization.
You know, he made scuttlebutt. I remember attending a workshop.
He made on making peer-to-peer chat rooms and he pointed out
aetherium to come office and then come obvious one to a
meet-up with metallic and then he came to me and it it sparked
my imagination, you know, it was like he it was all he wanted to
talk about at lunch and I was there for it and so we were just
like, riffing on it. There were a few Inside to try
to make in the past that this seems suited to.
So things like a debate system where you could figure out how
trustworthy a claim was or a voting system where you could
allocate funds or microtransactions.
And like these are all things where I was like, oh, finally
money and the internet. This is great.
We started trying to make a thing.
Of course, there was no account manager yet.
So we made Metal mask, and, you know, it built in all of our
prior assumptions. And I think that a lot of the
blockchain space today is kind of built out of everybody's
initial. Pression of what this new alien
technology is made out of and, and we, we made our best shot at
it. It was good enough to make a lot
of stuff and that's kind of where we are.
Now. We've been iterating, and
fine-tuning and improving. And for a few years now, I think
we validated it enough that you know, obviously now there's a
lot of big players entering the space and you know, like
well-funded think it what yesterday, Robin Hood announced.
They're going to have a web three, something, you know, all
that's very interesting. It's very funny for me where I
feel like we've done so much wrong and we have so much to fix
for tap people. Copying the current state of
things. I feel like all I see is ways to
improve and and I feel like everybody's kind of still just
doing impressions of web to you know, it's like we want to have
kind of an account model, right? Or like and money or something
and I think I think there's a lot of kind of What a lot of
uncertainty about what it's supposed to look like eventually
to interact with apps. And I think that we've kind of,
finally figured out. How does it really work?
And we just haven't shipped them all yet, and we're like in that
process. So I think we've like, you know,
just earned in this wonderful wealth of experience and we've
built up a really amazing team recently.
We brought the my crypto team in, and you know, there, another
one of the wallet teams that just has consistently seem to
just have there. Finger on the pulse of like user
actual needs, you know, understanding like the gravity
of the situation and how kind of carefully we need to move with
changes in things. So that yeah, sorry.
There it is. In a nutshell.
That's pretty much how I got into it and how I got to where I
am now. Yeah, awesome.
That sounds cool. I guess we can go a little bit
into that. Right?
As you just mentioned. You said basically weren't hired
directly to build a wallet, but you kind of figured it out with
within consensus. And now maybe you can tell us a
little bit about how how that Journey was from building metal
mask into what it is today and how maybe a bit about the team,
how it grew. Yeah.
Kumar has had started metal mask
even outside of consensus and so When when he got hired at
consensus, suddenly, he had the capacity to offer jobs to people
and so I was like, you know, I was kind of early in my Tech
Career. So I was I was a let's say not
as eager to jump out and start making my first startup as he
was but I joined him. As soon as consensus was funding
the project and I was really excited to and and yeah the
consensus was this wonderful just kind of chaotic incubator
at the early stage. There's like, I don't know.
It must have been hundreds of of different experiments getting
validated and tried out there. And there was a really exciting
energy, you know, surely there were a lot of projects getting
built before the kind of platform was ready to really
support it think I think back then it was very normal to just
kind of build your application as if the blockchain was going
to scale or did scale already. So you just treat the solidity
contract like it was a rails back end and keep everything on
the chain and I think I think that over time people have had
the The issue hammered into their heads and have a lot of
different ideas about how it needs to get addressed.
And yeah, that's just one of the one of the ways that we're
continuing to kind of grow and evolve.
I was thinking back earlier on how I first used metal mask when
it came out and kind of we've all gotten so used to living
with browser extension wallets, right?
So but zooming out, I kind of, I remember how dodgy it felt back
then just to kind of interact with the browser extension for
something that they're just so obviously value transaction.
So how did you and come rviz make that decision to kind of
build this as a browser extension rather than a
standalone application? Yeah, so when we first started
building their, the Mist wallet browser was already kind of
occupying the Standalone installer space and so they were
they were also doing a full node thing.
So you did install this, this in executable you'd get a browser
and it would sink the blockchain and your computer would heat up.
And you do, you know, wait, I think it only took like 15 to 30
minutes to sink back then. But, you know, so it was a kind
of weird experience. Every time you open your laptop
kind of heat it up or whatever, and Of the kind of founding
principles for metal mask was we want to make it easy to get in,
right? So we're trying to like, look,
how do we smooth the adoption path?
What are the assumptions that we can kind of weakened?
And and that are like maybe okay to compromise on for first time
users at the first of which was using in fira having a hosted
kind of trusted connection for the blockchain to start.
It was a very controversial take at the time and you know, there
are still some people that feel very Gently that that's like,
you know, fundamentally wrong and broken.
And, you know, I would love to see long-term more block chains
that are lightweight enough to run on consumer Hardware, but
that's not even one. Each one is just kind of
Impractical task users. Like especially when they're
first getting started. Right.
When your first interaction with the nude app is somebody saying,
hey, here's a way to sell an NFC or something.
Right? If the barrier is first
installed this, you know, 20 GB thing on your hard drive and
then you can Look at a picture. That's that's a very hard sell
and so commodious. And I were both were both web
developers. We both had a real love for the
kind of permissionless. NE some of the web, the fact
that you can drop a link into any text chat that you have with
someone completely between any channels.
It could be, you know, an SMS. It could be an email.
It doesn't matter where you take this magic little link.
And now, suddenly, you're in somebody else's world, like that
was for us, one of our design goals.
We're like, you should be able to click a link to one.
And go to it. And and yeah, it's so so that
was kind of a guiding principle to start and come off as spent,
you know, a first initial pass, a good portion of a first-year
trying to make the whole wallet kind of light browser work
entirely without an extension like working with in an iframe
within the browser. Basically building a browser in
the browser, which is, you know, an impressive thing to try.
And then at a certain point, it was either me or Nick Dodson was
just like, hey, wouldn't it save?
What if we just make tried making a web extension?
And he's like, yeah. And and it like he took what he
had done and, you know in like three days or something.
He'd put it into extension. And then I was like, all right,
let's get this ready for a hackathon because there's sxsw
was coming up. And so we just got a good enough
to hack on just to play with. And there's this music.
Hackathon had a whole bunch of music creators and hackers,
who'd never heard of blockchain before, it was just the music
hack about not a blockchain hackathon and we started Him,
you know, hey, what do you think you could do if you had money in
your, You music ecosystem, you know, I was, we were touring
with you Joe at the time and, you know, just, you know, a lot
of ideas were things like, oh, the microtransactions of what if
you make a beat and then you get paid when people mix it into
beats and, you know, things like that.
And you know artists no artists know what it's like to not get
your work valued, adequately and and yet they also know the value
of Their audience and more and more with internet with
Kickstarter and you know my patreon and things like that
people. Having access to your audience's
powerful. And so I think it was it was a
great event. And and yeah it kind of from
there. It was high friction.
A lot of people were skeptical, a lot of people, you know, other
hackathon hosts, there were like, you know, I'm going to
still recommend a maybe build a wall into their application, you
know, because it was just too weird at that time, but you
know, that's, we've seen culture shift a few times and during our
time here at meta mask. And yeah, why an extension
wouldn't it be more stable as a desktop?
Well, I mean, I totally believe that long-term more of the stuff
should be lower and lower level. You know, you want the maximum
security, you want to open Hardware, you want, Hardware
wallets, you want the maximum guarantees, you can get the
browser really was a decision because it's it's an on-ramp.
It's a first experience. It's about being able to give
somebody just that link that drops them in as quickly as
possible. And and really, I think that we
can do, we can do much better even than our current thing that
the current Norm of making somebody get a wallet.
And then Log in and select an account and get some eith all
before they can like like a post or something.
I think I think that that's a bad design pattern and I think
that we can do better as a community for that.
But yeah, yeah, that's a kind of getting ahead of myself.
Yeah, we're definitely want to like hear more about where you
think that should be going, I guess, right?
As you said, you kind of were part of the making these design
patterns that are now they're like, sign in with your wallet.
Things like that, right? In this hackathon.
It seems that wasn't even a thing yet.
And people didn't really know how that interaction would work.
I guess. It's also segue to like metal
mask is not just a browser extension, right?
There's also mathematics mobile which, which, I guess.
Is has been a big Trend to get like more people on board,
right? People are used to use their
phone for their banking apps or wallet, or in general to use
their phone. And then obviously you made the
choice to also build metal mask mobile.
Can you talk a little bit about we wear that, it's sad, how it
is decision was made kind of how people use it today.
Yeah, I think mobiles, one of the easiest decisions in the
world because, you know, you just look at the numbers.
Most, everybody just about has a phone and not everybody.
A computer and you're like, okay.
Well, there you go. Mobile's therefore has to be the
future. Now.
I think there's some real advantages for the desktop,
which is that in particular everything's getting programs on
a desktop. So so if you're the developer
tool, then you're going to you're going to make the
developers going to make sure that you're compatible with
them. So the extension has this kind
of developer experience advantage and I think that
there's there's kind of an uphill battle to make sure that
that web three sites kind of work as As well on mobile and
you know, we've got a ways to go on that developer tooling but
the goal was always to basically say, you know, same promises the
web, you know, you make a website and it works on desktop
or mobile that shouldn't matter, you know, we're trying to build
an internet of value, you should be able to take value wherever
you go, you know, just not just confined to when you're sitting
at your computer. It's you know, it's a dynamic
thing. You should be able to make any
agreement anywhere you want. You know within your own terms,
you know, maybe you don't carry around the, you know, carry
around your grandmother's pearls on the when you're going out but
you know, you bring some spending cash, you know, things
like that. Yeah, absolutely.
Can you give us some idea how many people use.
Meta Moscow, what kind of values are stored in?
Meta mask? What kind of use cases it's
actually used for by people. I'm pretty.
I'm I don't know. Really say this.
I'm pretty sure like 98% of people who listen to this
podcast, have first-hand experience with meta mask, but I
think kind of hearing the stats is the warranted.
Yeah. So the latest number I heard is
that we finally got to around 35 million monthly active users.
That's somebody who in the month, has interacted with an
app. So either they connected, where
they approve the transaction or signature or something, and the
use cases are actually quite varied, you know.
So, depending on your corner of the crypto sphere, you might be
in a bubble and you might think that there's only one major use
case, you know, I know that the nft community sees itself as
often as like the kind of one thing that's going on the defy
communities. Definitely had a period of
seeing herself as the possible main use case gaming is also,
for many people. The only use that they have for
meta masks were web 3 and and then there's meanwhile, there's
the whole do ecosystem people, you know, figuring out how to
issue grants and fundraise. Lee.
I think these are all really cool in different ways, I think
they all have some common themes of kind of giving people
ownership of digital rights and I do kind of think of a wallet
as one of these computer, like, things that has to be dynamic.
It has to fit your needs. It can't be well, I mean, don't
get me wrong, it can be custom tailored to a use case.
So some some wallets, you know, maybe ones that you might have
mentioned in the Tro might be giving a very good experience
around something like staking for example, and for somebody
who wants to get yield on staking that's great and you
know, having a lots of staking options really quickly is a
really reasonable Niche for a while at occupy and there are
other wallets that are specialized in gaming and
there's other wallets that are specialized it.
And I've teased I think partly just for historical reasons
because Madame, s kind of was the first thing that just made
like anything possible. We're kind of in this position
where we still kind of serve everybody and So we kind of are
in a position where by necessity partly and then also because
it's an interesting position continue to pursue being a
general-purpose wallet and and you know, frankly, I wouldn't
have it any other way. I think it's a really, really
interesting problem. I've come to know the the the
challenges and solutions that are available to this kind of
Niche. I think they're kind of
essential to Safe Computing in general.
I think the problems that we're taking on as a wallet are
actually pretty. Much the same problems that you
have. Keeping your computer safe.
The reason people get fished and hacked on the web.
It's not because there's cryptocurrency is because
there's cryptocurrency and people don't know how to keep
computers safe. Like, there's kind of two
problems here and if cryptocurrency had evolved in an
environment where people knew how to keep computer safe.
I don't think we would have this problem, but I don't think that
history ever pushed people to secure their computers this hard
before. And I think that we're kind of
seeing, okay, we've had personal computers for You know, 30 some
odd years, but the truth is they're kind of badly secured,
kind of just good enough. We have to invalidate our
passwords every two days, just to kind of have a chance at not
getting identity thieved. And I think it's, for me.
It's forced me to step back and say, hey, wait a minute, like
computers themselves are kind of like alien technology.
We're kind of just cargo cult around computers saying, like,
what are these good for? Can we build Society on them?
You know, but I don't think we've answered Answered,
fundamental questions about computers yet.
I don't think people, but I think that the patterns are
emerging. So things like permission
systems things like having good sandboxing, think those are like
the beginnings of like, oh, keeping untrusted things at
arm's length. And I think that those patterns
that you see, you know, Androids got a pretty good sandbox and
permissions model. Think that's very similar to
what we end up being in the internet of value.
And so we're kind of we're rediscovering, kind of the same
principles were saying, what does it mean to have some
Digital rights or responsibilities and then
selectively kind of wire them together.
Not just with your printer and your disk drive, but now with
like the rest of the world's Computing and doing that in a
coherent and Safe. Way is like, it's like the
whole, it's a very big fun. Interesting problem for for
computing in general. Wow, yeah, that's that's go
super David. I know you are also kind of part
of this aghori community a little bit where this is this
kind of related right to object base capabilities and and kind
of trying to keep things secure like that on the smart contract
level. I guess.
I'm also wondering why Iris the wallet part in that is there are
there certain areas where the wallet plays a role?
Or is it really just on the contract level that you you kind
of shrink the Securities, the surface or are there like
specific things on the wallet size?
That can be improved in your opinion.
Yeah. Yeah, I the general idea is that
I'm describing about making computer systems where you can
reason about how to keep them secure.
Those are very those are problems that I learned.
The Agora folk had been thinking about for a long time and I
think some of the richest literature on that topic is
coming out of them and their community and kind of adjacent
groups to them and and I've really adored my time like
getting to know them and getting to collaborate with them on some
projects. We've been funding them on a
grant. Due to renew them, but for their
secure JavaScript, or hardened J's project, which were using to
secure our supply chain and for building a portion of our
extensibility system snaps and so sorry.
Coming back to yeah. Yeah, sorry.
So you're saying is that related to a cork?
Yes. Absolutely.
Agaric. I think has a lot of experience
building distributed systems. They kind of tend to draw people
into there. Community, who hip similar
problems saying, like, oh, I tried to build an open
multiplayer world and I realized it's hard to make that safe and
then they end up coming to a kind of similar consistent
conclusions. And so, yeah, I think that
there's some good good camaraderie there.
I kind of was avoiding the, the jargon I'm practicing avoiding.
Jargon as much as I can. If I say object capabilities,
you might say, okay what I don't care or something, you know.
So but you know, if I say, you know, make make it
understandable when you're taking risks, you know, that's
basically the exact same thing. The idea of the object is that
an object? Is this abstract thing.
You own it, you know, it's like a token or an mft is an object.
And how do you basically maximally allow a user to
interact with that and do things with it?
You know, the norm on blockchains today is one person
has something Saying, if you want to do something, if you
want to stake it, you know, you put it in that contract, you
know, there are allowances, allow it to start to resemble.
Sharing capabilities. Capabilities are kind of like,
extension cords, where you're like, you plug a port from one
thing into another today, the norm for smart contracts.
Everything has its own ports. You know, your C20 has one
allowance standard Arc. 721 has another allowed standard your
see, 11:55 the the multi token standard that board Apes uses.
It has another With standard. And this one is not granular at
all. When you give someone permission
to you to withdraw one board ape, you allow them to take all
of your board apes. And this is the Crux of a whole
phishing scam. This morning.
Seth Green, you know, I know this will are like a week from
now, Seth Green came out and he apparently was fished and
through an allowance scam just like this, you know, they were
able to ask him to approve one. You know, there's there's a
there's a lot of problems that kind of combine to that.
There's there's a problem of some sourcing the metadata to
represent. This is one of your things you
care about. This isn't just a random smart
contract and then there's a problem of the granularity of
the permission. Like you shouldn't, you know,
issue to all of them. That should maybe just be 21.
So yeah. Yeah, the the basic theory is,
how do you, how do you give people good authority over the
things they have and have access to?
And yet give them the ability to compose them.
Right? So safety and composability.
We don't want to tie people's hands and say you're safe, you
know. But we want to say, you know,
okay, you can do whatever you want.
But like, here's here's, here's how to stay safe.
Here's here's the lines around the, the dangerous bits and, you
know, do what you're willing, you know, do what you want.
You've touched on a multitude of different topics and there's a
lot to unpack, and maybe let's start at the very beginning of
setting up a wallet. So, basically, you said about
what it, and then there's the seed, phrase, the 12 words are
60 words or whatever. So, I mean, we've kind of, we've
gotten used to that, right. So basically, we know it's
coming, but zooming out again, this seems like a terrible user
experience, right? And so maybe that's that's talk
about where you see the future of seat phrases.
Do you see a future of seat phrases?
I guess for legacy purposes, you know like you you want you might
want to be able to back up some old things that are not
transferable. Although, you know, if I have my
way, the ethereum blockchain will adopt some VIPs that allow
you to transfer account holder ship to other accounts.
And so you should be able to migrate them then to but yeah,
so maybe but but I think we should be able to move off them
as much as possible. I think it's It's nice that
people have the option to be in total custodial control of their
wallets. And even critical that people
have the option of keeping things.
Totally cold, being able to send assets to something.
That is unhackable. Entirely is like, it's great.
It's a proof that this is a decentralized system that nobody
can take her asset from you that you can be as safe as you can
keep anything. And that's that's all great.
The problem is, is that Okay, you get this one secret and it
has all your stuff, you know, and okay.
So if you're very Advanced insecure, you might keep some on
a hardware wallet, but then Hardware wallets, they innovate
even slower than the software while.
It's so the things that you can do the transactions, you can
review their fewer and fewer and so you're trading off the
usability of the system for security.
And so that kind of comes back to.
Okay, tying your hands and saying that you're safer.
I think that we can do better than that.
Ideally, you know, you'd go to a site, you could use it a bit, do
some things. And then, if there was at some
point, something you cared about their, you can have the option
to back it up in any number of ways that are, you know, kind of
risk tolerance to you. You could say, you know, do you
know, if you've got a hard drive, that's good.
Fine. If you trust your disc, good,
you know, if you want to use a hardware wallet.
Great, you know, if you're cool with a putting it on your mobile
phone, using your mobile phone as a signer.
That's more solid for most people.
If you've got an old phone that you don't use, that's an upgrade
also, and it's viable. And if you want to wire together
a multisig, you know, for some higher Stakes things that can
make sense. And then I think that kind of
the most critically missing piece that I think nobody's
looking at right now just to drop a little bit of output or
whatever it is. Is the allowing your different
devices to be delegated. Just the permission that they
need to operate. There's been a little bit of
this from contract accounts like Argent who have self-assigned
daily spending limits, but those self-assigned limits are still
from an account that holds everything.
And so if it gets compromised, you still lose everything.
I want to see a world where you could have a cold wallet, whose
assets you delegate to a hardware wallet in some limited.
A city, whose assets, you could then delegate to your hot wallet
in some limited capacity, you know, and so you could have, you
could have any number of accounts on any number of assets
and you don't really think about them as accountant assets.
You think of them as accounts error, sorry as assets.
And each asset, may actually have a secret key behind it, but
you shouldn't have to reason about that.
You should just know. I've got a bunch of stuff on
this cold wallet or on his Hardware wallet and I'm setting
up a new device. So what do I want that device to
have, you know, do I want it to be able All to give away my
board ape know then don't give it permission to simple as that,
you know, that's the, that's the, like kind of object
capability thing. It's just like, Consent like no
permission without consent, right?
So you should be able to have cold stuff, but then you should
be able to delegate limited permissions.
You say. This is going to be my, I'm
going to be voting on The ens do from this.
I don't want to sell the tokens from this.
I want to vote, so you should be able to provision just the
permissions you want. So you should be able to say I
want voting rights on my hot machine.
I don't. And now you're hot machine would
be literally unhackable for anything other than that
purpose. And if it was ever hacked, the
worst thing that Could happen is some bad boats, get cast in your
name and then you could revoke them from the initial granting
Authority device, but that sounds like, I mean, that sounds
like more private keys not fewer.
Right? So basically, by having more
granular, permissions settings, you would actually have to, you
know, hold and control way more private Keys than you currently.
I mean, so basically there are some people with stupid amounts
of money on meta masks, right? So basically, See them at
conferences and they show you something.
And you go like okay, seriously, this this is this is don't tell
me. Yeah, so I know that ages ago at
consensus. There was this project that kind
of looked at like this in-game location thing as as a seed
phrase. I do you think seed phrases will
ever become? More human memorable than they
currently are. Or do you think we will just
have to rely on backup mechanisms and Guardians and
social recovery mechanisms. Where do you think it's going?
Oh, I mean, kind of like I said, at one point, I think people
will be able to choose the ways that are preferable to them.
So, if you want to do a brainwallet, you should be able
to delegate, you know, you like, you could memorize the right to
withdraw all of your funds, right?
And and then if you can memorize the key that controls that, then
you can back up the message that imbues that key on a public
website. So everyone could see.
Oh, there's a key out there that could, you know, withdrawal of
your funds and send them to the Bahamas or Whatever.
And, and so I don't see any problem with people having the
option of having a memorized key and okay, so do get away from
seed phrases. Well, if somebody wants a seed
phrase, if somebody wants to have 12 words that they back up,
maybe because they have, you know, there's so many crypto
steals sitting around or something.
I think it's fine for that to be an option.
But I think a safer Norm is that usually devices generate keys in
a secure Enclave. In those keys.
Never leave that device. And so usually when you're
deploying to a new device, you're deploying to keys that
cannot be extracted. And so the only way to extract
value from those is through signatures and operations with
those keys, which while it should be rendering in a human
readable way. And so, you know, if all is done
correctly, it's harder to fish from wallets that are doing that
because there's not just one secret.
That's may be harder to reason about the to steal instead.
You have to get a user to hopefully perform an act of sent
that they've they've been habituated to recognize before
that you can take from them. So yeah, I guess I guess in
short. I think I think devices should
have their own Keys as much as possible.
You should still be able to delegate a capabilities to other
keys. At the end of the day.
This is all built on cryptography, right?
You're not going to get away from there, being private keys
somewhere. I think that we can make them
less portable. I think some people will still
probably choose to backup to see phrases, but those will probably
be Pro users. Who you know, just know what
they're doing very well. The average user is probably
going to prefer to have something maybe like social
recovery, or maybe maybe a custodial back up with just the,
you know, limited allowance in fraud protection.
Just like Banks do today, except open-ended it Turing, complete
and able to connect to Smart contracts.
It's funny. So basically had we recorded
this episode two years ago. And I think everyone would
assume you're making the case for smart contract wallet's
here, right? So, tell us about, can you talk
about how the, how the thinking has shifted from Smart contract
wallet, Stewie ways with enhance capabilities.
Oh, I think the line is a little blurry.
So so I'm talking about just the general principle, that things
should be delegated bubble. And actually so I'll share I've
I've been working on a little solidity library to kind of
demonstrate what I've been what I'm talking about.
It's a mix in that any solidity Library can inherit from called
delegate. Obol and when a, when a contract
has that, it gets a generic delegation interface.
And so now they can delegate any permission.
And on with any restrictions to any other key.
And so you can write these delegations other keys.
I think that composes well with smart contract, while it's a
smart contract, while it is good if you want to get a group of
signers to agree on something but then a delegation is good
for if you want a One agent, which could be a group of
signers to then kind of permission another agent, which
could be either a key or another group of signers, but some
limited Authority. So you can have a doubt that
says, okay well, We need you to go shopping.
So, here's a, here's an allowance.
Right? We don't need to approve the
budget request, you know, can you imagine going to the grocery
store and then scanning the checkout line?
And then waiting for your, you know, your token holders to vote
like no. No, of course not.
You need permission to do things.
So interact in a dynamic world. And so I think that, I think the
Dow's multi cigs, all of these higher security constructs are
going to, I think by necessity if they want.
To be dynamic and composable. They're going to need to embrace
systems where sometimes they broaden the reach of their, you
know, the broadened, the, the inclusion of control over their
digital assets. I think this is just normal
essential composability. And so I think it works well
together. I think that more things should
use. Yes, smart contract logic to
assign Authority and ideally every yo, a would have access to
this stuff. And actually, one of the reasons
I'm a proponent for EIP, 30 74, is it would allow every eoa to
assign a smart contract to be able to act on its account.
And so if you have 30 70 for every account could assign off
chain delegation methods for anything, it could do.
And so you could you almost you wouldn't need allowance methods
on contracts anymore. And this is basically what the
delegate herbal Nixon does. You don't have to write
allowance methods anymore because it provides a method for
Once assigned these off chain messages that can imbue its
recipient with any arbitrary power.
They, it uses a smart contract, as its enforcer.
So, yeah, to me, it's just another tool in the kind of, I
guess it's a tool for composability.
I see the smart contract. Wallet is largely a tool for
adding restrictions on controlling assets.
And I think this is kind of a counterbalance we're saying,
okay, we've learned how to keep things Tighter and Tighter.
Now you need a multisig. Now, we need a token vote.
But how do you, how do you now? How do you relax a little bit?
Once you've built up, trust in your community?
How do you? Yeah, authorized or Empower more
people to act on your behalf? Yeah, I think that's super
interesting. I guess maybe it's a tie it back
a bit to that board a story where you get permission for
like transferring out all the board Apes in this scenario that
you're describing. If I delegate this to another
address like do I have to kind of specify which contracts
exactly kind of interact with, like, how, how does that look in
practice? Is there some standard needed?
That is says like, you know, only these contracts.
Like how how will that action look or do you always have to
give a complete control? Will I guess that's that's kind
of where we're heading. Like how do you make that
possible? So there are more fences
basically to choose from where you want to put them.
Yeah. So the the delegate herbal
system by default to delegation method can imbue, so the
recipient with all of your Authority on that contract, but
it has this caveat system where you can add as many caveats as
you want to a delegation. And those caveats can restricted
in any way you can imagine. So I was making a proof of
concept for detecting fissures and Reporting Fishers.
I want to make a web of trust. I want to permission as many
people to detect fissures and report them as possible.
Right? It's obviously a high.
It's a high-value target for something like this.
And so so what I realized is okay, the fishing registry is
ownable, but I want to share the ability to report Fisher's not
the ability to transfer the entire registry.
And so I wrote a caveat, you know, it's like three lines of
solidity that says not the ownable.
It's no transferring ownership, you know, none of that.
Just reporting Fishers. And now I can sign delegation
methods where people holding these methods note.
No on change transaction needed? No gasps.
I can send them this permission and now with no gas that they
can sign a report and it's a meta transaction friendly
things. Someone else can support it,
submit it for them or the the even crazier thing is no one can
submit it. If it's something like a fishing
report. You can just kind of
counterfactually Gossip this message and You can look at it
and they can say, oh, yeah, anyone can submit this.
The same way a minor extractable value person can do they look at
the message say, oh, I could call that transaction.
I would see this as a Fisher and now we can build this off chain
registry, where it's all rooted in unchain, permissions of the
contracts enforce it. But by looking at the contracts
and building up these messages, that could be submitted to the
chain, we can build up these kind of blockchain.
Parallel databases that, you know, can be any size at all.
The only thing that has to go Chain is when revoking your
permission to someone you say. Oh actually their messages
aren't good. Anywhere that has to go to the
chain because you're trying to make sure nobody trusts their
message anymore. That's where the censorship
resistance of the blockchain kind of plays in.
How far do you think this is in the future?
Well, I mean, I had I have a proof of concept of that that
works now, but it doesn't scale really great.
Part of the problem is because the individual clients usually
don't have a full blockchain node, but you know, I if I make
a note that lets you hold those messages, now, you have to be
able to validate them again, to validate them against the node.
That becomes very expensive. So we either need to have like,
see DNS, caching it, or we need a good client side lightweight.
Sinclair like laconic, my friend.
Rick Dudley is working on this kind of caching system that
builds on another client. And now your wallet would be
able to cash. Just the information from the
contracts that you kind of are interested in.
And it only updates those. When those contracts update, you
get the block header. And are you have a proof that
your stuff hasn't changed. It's going to be so good for
things like keeping your token. Balances up to date.
Because, you know, today on every block update, every single
wallet is checking your balance on.
Every token on every network of every type and then plus the
ones that they want to Auto detect.
So it's the super Network intensive thing.
But but meanwhile, we literally the blockchain is designed for
you to prove that things haven't changed.
So it's this kind of embarrassing.
Caching opportunity that the hopefully Rick is going to solve
really soon really need a trick because because the whole
scalability of this scheme that I'm describing hinges on the
people's ability to compare off chain messages to the the
current state of the chain. It's funny how it kind of
crosses this gossiping network network with you know, the on
Shan State sir. Super interesting.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean there's obviously so many really amazing ways of scaling
right now and I was thrilled when I realized that this
construction that I was kind of building for the sake of user
consent, when I started realizing.
Oh, it also has scalability properties.
I was just, uh, I was so happy. It was like, and but it's funny
because it maybe shouldn't have been a coincidence because
granting new permissions is historically, not a thing that
requires a blockchain, right? You can right-click a JPEG you
have permission to view the image, right?
The blockchain is always been about losing control.
It's the double spend problem. It's that when you give someone
money, you have to lose access to it.
So for any situation where you're growing trust, I think we
can keep things off chain more. And so I think that we can
builds wallet patterns and dap interaction patterns.
Patterns that are actually more off chain friendly.
And I think this can mean that when users use adapt for the
first time they can actually postponed needing a wallet, a
lot more. And actually, my fishing adapt
proof-of-concept. I'm calling it Moby mask.
You can go to it at low beam ask.com like Moby Dick because
because we're whales trying to take out Fisher's.
It's invite only because like the whole thing is, you have to
have a delegation signature, right?
But, um, but when I was making it, I was realizing, oh, you can
redeem, you can get invited and you can report Without a wallet.
So I started realizing I had to move the wallet connection.
Further further down. I had forked a project that had
the wallet connection, you know that big wall at the beginning
of the DAP. It says like pick a wallet, get
a wallet. Look at all the wallets in the
world, scroll by them, find yours.
You know that horrible experience.
What I realized is 0 we kind of recaptured that Spirit of the
hyperlink like you got a link. I give you an invite link.
You get there and you're going and there's literally like do
you need a backup? Well, the back A cup is actually
the invite link that's in your text message.
So you almost don't need a backup.
So when using this system, you the only time that you need a
seed phrase is if you, well, if you want to delegate to it, so
you want to back it up like cold or something, you know, like
obviously there's higher higher Stakes, use cases, where you
would want that. But for lightweight things, you
know, you can start to really ask which things.
Do you actually need a backup for?
Like, I bet you. There's a lot of things that
don't need a backup. There's a lot of things we're
just like spreading permission saying like hey, Vote on our
proposal, you know, okay, you know, that should be it should
be like that should not need a while like most of the time and
and then the wallet is like for the meta transaction.
Relayer. It's for the pro user that the
admin the person who's like, you know, revoking access to the
person who's like, adjudicating disputes and stuff.
Those are the people who need to submit to the blockchain and
maybe that actually ends up being a pro user thing.
And then most users never even look at gasps.
That's that's a hope I have. And, you know, so I'm a, I'm
going to be playing with that. Or I hope people try out that
delegated belief thing, which I'll be like publishing right
around. The time is this is coming up.
I really want to look into this. Now.
The one thing that kind of immediately comes comes to mind,
is does this somehow make you vulnerable to spammers?
Because basically, there is no longer cost Associated right?
With kind of sending messages. Yeah, so the the nodes that
could be vulnerable to scammers are spammers in the situation
would be like the caching nodes. So if anyone can sign a message,
then you could gossip around kind of Fake Messages.
These messages are validated as chains of signatures the.
So in order to spam them you would have to have a chain of
valid signatures that the node hadn't seen before.
So it has kind of similar spam properties to a normal Block
Chain node. Like it's validating a
signature. The first thing signature
validation is free, you know, like if you don't know.
At the secret but like you could kind of spam any watching node
with a bunch of signatures that are fake and they're going to
they're going to check if the signatures real, you know, so,
you know, you can always layer some extra anti-spam stuff on
top of that just rate-limiting Banning people who spams, you
know, once I'm once one IP has submitted one bad signature, you
know, then rate limit them increase it.
You could probably borrow like Tit for Tat with forgiveness out
of BitTorrent or something like that.
But yeah, I don't think it's more prone to to problems like
that than other blockchain type nodes.
All right, I guess. Maybe tying it back to Madam,
asked a bit from from this, right?
I guess how actually does this interact with a damask.
I guess you're saying, we're moving this.
A little bit and then the wallet comes later.
Is there some scenario where then, finally, you get the sign
in and you use metal mask? Or is this like a completely
separate layer almost? Yeah, I think that they
interact. They have a relationship and and
I think it's nice if it's like, can think of it as you can have
assets on a site and if you're not moving them out of that site
or going anywhere else, then you're probably fine without a
wallet. And in many ways.
I think the wallet is kind of this place where you take that
your capabilities and you bring them to other contexts.
So the thing that's always been cool and exciting about a
theorem. It's the composability like,
anyone can, you know, host a server with the token?
But the thing that's really crazy is like, oh every single
token isn't public API and anyone can build a dowel that
uses it as its voting rights or an exchange that lets you swap
them like any like everything's open.
Everything's permissionless. So it's that context switching.
That's like the real power of web 3, the like everything is
permissionless lie. Open.
And so, in this pattern what my initial impression of it is is
that you could have a lot of websites, that and apps that are
not Not needing a while it connection until some certain
actions. It could be relaying
transactions to the blockchain. It could be loading those assets
into your wallet. So they're portable.
It could be 0, loading them into the wall.
It can also let you do other cool things.
So I told you that the delegation for delegate Dottie.
It supports arbitrary, caveat. So when you delegate to someone,
you can have whatever terms you want on it.
Now, I made the movie Mask site every day.
Every invite link just has the same terms.
Just like it's revocable, you know, you can report Fisher's
but I can take it back. But if you, if you made this a
standard and added it to a wallet, then then in your
wallet, you could go down your assets.
You can click any asset and you could say, okay, send them that
allowance but and then you could like, have a list of terms, you
could say just, you know, just this many tokens just for this
much time. Only for these uses, you know,
only on approved, you know, SEC improved investment.
It's or whatever, you know, you can have whatever terms you
want. You can just stack them up.
And I think that the wallet is a nice place to kind of aggregate.
These many things into a coherent set of possession.
So digital possession. So that now you can go to other
places and you can log in now. And, and now when you're logging
into sites, you've got all these like standard.
Nice ways of defining your own terms, you know, normal terms on
web to they say, we need these permissions.
It's a rigid thing. You get, no say, you hope they
have a logout timer. You hope they have to fa in this
scenario when they ask for what they need.
Maybe they just need some tokens.
So you can do a swap and now you can add whatever extra terms
that you want. So you actually have a part
you're participating in the negotiation of terms, when
connecting to websites in this in this Paradigm.
And so being able to load these kinds of assets of these
messages into your wallet is the thing I'm excited to do.
Now. I just made a proof of concept,
you know, solidity contract. Who am I to Like tell the
theorem Community that's the new standard but that's not how I
that's not how I run things. You know, this is part of why
I'm building a snap system. The snap system for metal mask
isn't extensibility system. So that new standards like this
can be validated in the wallet. So I actually don't need
permission from the rest of my team to try this out and to add
it into the wallet. And other people could take what
I did. And they could say, oh, you
messed up in these ways and they could make their own standard
and they could add it into the wallet to and so, Really kind of
coming back to the notion that meta masks role in the ecosystem
is to enable permissionless Innovation, right?
That's what a theorem is good at.
That's what computers are good at is what the web browsers good
at. We're just trying to kind of get
out of people's way and, you know, so I have my theories
about what I think a secure safe, consensual digital
interaction. Looks like, but rather than just
impose them like, you know, I could say, So integration is
coming every few weeks where I could say, you know, some
exchanges they have listing fees.
They you know, say oh, yeah your standard gets in for the right
price. Now we're taking an approach of
the wallet allows anything. In we're trying to build a tool
that lets people just be creative and and lets people
move around with the digital assets they have, and hopefully
reduce the risk and let them kind of cooperate in new
creative ways. I still want to talk about the
snaps in a little bit. But before that, let me kind of
tie in with what you said. So basically if you if you Frey
reframe this a bit, it would actually give you a sort of
fragmented identity system for yourself.
Right? So basically, you can you kind
of decide what to share with with with which services and
smart contracts you interact with.
So how How do you see the connection between meta, mask
and assess Sovereign identity system?
Yeah, I mean, I see it as a form of self Sovereign identity.
I guess I have some qualms with the, the identity framing of the
issue. I think oftentimes identity is
usually related to somebody making a claim about you like,
like, oh, you're a citizen or you're not and, and claims are
nice and interesting for some uses, you know, and like I'm
saying, I want to be able to report Fisher's.
I think, you know, claims are. What I think is really
critically different about what I'm describing is that I'm not
just talking about the wallet. Holding a bunch of claims about
yourself. I'm talking about the wallet
holding the things that you can do and allowing you to extend
those permissions to other things.
So these aren't just claims that you would trust somebody to do
something. Hypothetically.
These are literal cryptographic messages that imbue the
recipient with that ability. And so I think it's got a much
higher Leverage. Implication once you connect.
So, you know, if you connect to a site and they want a token
allowance, that's because they want to interact with your
tokens right now and that's what makes it powerful.
We should allow composability like that for anything but with
user Sovereign attenuation, that users should be able to say oh
but on my terms, right? And so I think it's very very
related. I think that the only difference
the only difference that I really see between like a
verifiable credential system and a No Cap object.
Type system is whether the claim is rooted in a ability to do
something. It's does.
This does this signature mean? You can now just call a function
and make something happen. Is there a robot that will
literally redeem this signature for something?
Or is it just kind of like a claim, you know, like a Clio?
Okay, we can have an internet of claims but like, okay, so people
are gossiping. I guess that's nice.
But I guess what I'm really in this for is I'm trying to build
scalable social systems and that means oftentimes spreading
access to resources, right? We're really talking about.
How do we, how do we combine our resources in a more efficient
way? How do we fund the best
thought-out project? How do we, like, kind of path?
Find to those things? And and so for me, creating
actual access to resources is just a more interesting problem.
Maybe going into a little bit like from the user side.
Now, you're saying the user has like a say, is that really like
on the level, or is it what you're imagining on the level of
B, being a web to user like just normal person going on his
computer and somehow specifying these limits.
Like, how do I get the idea? What should I be limiting?
It's just like, Candace, just be done by like some developers is
this. Would there be some interface
for you to understand this? I sure don't want it to be just
developer. Yeah.
Yeah, the whole point of this
stuff, right? Is that normal people should be
able to use it and, you know, of course, it makes sense to
developers can do it first because we're building these
systems on computers. So if you speak the language
that computers understand, you're at an advantage and I
would just encourage any listener.
If you think that's hard, just take a stab at it.
There's a lot of, a lot of online courses.
Make it a lot easier than you ever thought.
You know, I wanted on some of those Mine, so, I went on
scratch first. It's made for kids to learn to
program. I learned on, you know, Udacity
and Coursera, you know, these websites are excellent at
teaching you these things. So I don't actually think it
programming is that hard but even that said, I think that,
you know, rather than saying I think it should be made.
So easy that people who don't program should be able to do it.
I might say, I think that programming should be made so
easy that anyone can do it or something in between.
There's like that that line should be blurred.
We're talking about computer. Forced agreements.
And we want people to be able to interact with those agreements.
So the design space is wide open.
There's a huge opportunity to enable people to participate in
digital agreements better. It's a huge space and you know,
I think the way the wallets work today and met a mask included is
where hard coding the types of agreements that we can represent
to a user and that's an embarrassing State of Affairs.
You know, that's why things like I mean, I really I really feel
terrible about like the Seth Green.
Because like, you know, yeah, it said, said approval for all on
his confirmation, but I don't think it said, like the board a
piak club. Like, I don't think we'd loaded
their metadata. And, you know, and today that
meta data curation is a manual task.
It's like a GitHub repository, but obviously what we should be
doing is, you know, broadening the reach of aggregating, all
that kind of information and you know, again it kind of comes
down to that delegation thing. How do we spread the right to
populate? Our metadata registry more
broadly, right? Because We need to be able to
protect people in so many use cases, you know, and we need
people to be able to inform each other.
We don't want them to have to trust us.
We want them to be able to like, declare what they trust, and
then get as informed as possible through those sources.
No. No, I think this makes total
sense. I think there's, we're so early,
right? So basically, if you look at the
governance and security space, so basically if you don't want
to trust one single person then basically, how do you how do you
trust them? Hope to make the right
decisions. How do you I mean, yeah, I think
this is yeah, it's just the kind of problem set.
We're currently facing you you talked about snaps earlier and I
would like to cover that it can you give us an intro on snaps?
Yes, snaps is an extensibility system for the metal mask
wallet. There are a lot of Dimensions to
the wallet where we found ourselves being Gatekeepers
inadvertently. We didn't try to be Gatekeepers.
We just realized that everybody wants to have their Network.
Everyone wants to add their token.
Everyone wants to add there, you know, fraudulent, transaction
detection system. Everybody wants to add their new
Block Chain, you know, their new VIP method for better data, log
ins, you know, All these Dimensions where we were just
finding ourselves, you know us against, you know, of a large
group of very passionate and intelligent people.
And we don't want to, you know, we don't want to be arguing
against a large group of intelligent passionate people.
That's the worst. We want to get the hell out of
their way. We want to let them just like
ideally, you know, it's like I think people get held up on the
open source component. A little bit of people are like,
oh, yeah, you know, if you were just open source, somebody would
Fork it they'd make a better wallet.
Well, the truth is you for Kit. You're going to add the one
feature you have in mind. You're not going to add all the
features that every user wants. And so I think that the heart of
like actual like community-driven creativity is
more about composability. It's all about the same way.
Aetherium is all about the contracts, being able to
interact with each other. I think that, you know, the
wallet is kind of your personal smart contract space where you
declare, what you care about. These are your, these are your
assets. These are the things.
Willing to connect to and trust. And so snaps was an answer to,
how do we bring in all this Innovation?
How do we get out of the way and let people contribute to wallet,
Evolution at their speed of their creativity, not at the
speed of our review process. And so, yeah, we did a lot of
research on kind of secure code confinement and there's
obviously a lot of interesting things on that.
It led us in particular to meet the Agora folks who are working
on. Scripts confinement.
And so they actually have it's basically a JavaScript function
that allows you to evaluate code in a confined context.
So, you know, if you're a, if you know, JavaScript, you know,
the word eval is like evil because you call it and then the
the string that you passed to, it can do anything and that's
terrible. And so you should never call
eval. But the gork folks made this
thing called a compartment where you can now call eval but it
only has access to the things you give it.
And so it's this kind of local code version.
Kind of what I'm talking about. When I talk about connecting to
daps you, you can now run some local JavaScript and give it
just the permissions that you want and so very much like the
way you connect to add app and you give it some, you know,
blockchain based permissions. Now we can run some local wallet
extensions and give them some local wallet permissions.
Like the permission to add a new token type to your, to, your
wallet, or a new account type. And so, we've got a prototype
snaps for adding a variety of blockchains to met a mask.
For adding contract accounts to metal mask, for adding new
fishing detection. There's a password manager.
One is, I was starting to prototype a new signature
standard, you know, there's the IP 712.
But there's a fifth ver, Trevor revision, and rather than pull
requested to metal mask. I just prototyped it in a snap,
you know, it kind of opens up the space of wallet Innovation,
outside of a standards process. I think standards processes are
not permit. This Innovation, you know, right
now there's a little bit of a movement to like.
Hey, all the while it should make standards together.
And don't get me wrong. There are some things where we
should just do it consistently, so we can interface and
interoperate better. But, you know, it's better to me
than standards is spaces where people don't need permission,
you know, maybe this is just me because like I'd wanted to get
into entertainment for a while, you know, and like, if you ever
tried to get into entertainment, well, at least, you know, when I
was doing it, it was like, oh the Hollywood, you know, like
German or whatever, obviously, it's different now with
podcasting and YouTube and things.
But, you know, whenever there's a situation where you have to
ask permission or you have to get other, you have to convince
other people just to do it. Just feels like the wrong way to
me. Like I really care about
building tools where people can just have ideas and run with
them and you know in computers are great for that computers.
But as long as you build Those computer systems in a way that
are friendly to in a gratian and that's kind of what
extensibility is and I think snaps is incredible for metal
mask, but I actually think long-term every application will
be extensible and it won't be like you're an extension on one
other thing. It'll be like these things work
together. It'll be more just collaborative
the way that contracts are on ethereum.
Yeah, I do think it's like a nice extension of that etherium
idea of like, you know, permissionless Innovation and
just taking it on this wanted level.
And I also like, where you said, okay general-purpose wallet
either wallets are kind of building things specific for the
use case. I think that's a frustration for
a lot of people that it's like, oh, when that's metal mask, like
this new network that, and why is it so hard to switch Network,
I guess, snaps wood. As I understand, try to address
that but on the level that, yeah.
I know, everyone can add that. But now I guess my question
would be Okay, we have all these people that can extend it in a
way for a user. How does it actually look?
Do I have to like choose which extension?
I want to support from these snaps or is like there's some
automated way or how does that? Actually, from the user sides
work. There's a particular pattern
that I think is going to be more and more important and it's like
the process of adding something to your wallet today.
There's kind of a norm of Auto detecting tokens, you know, I
recently heard a wallet advertisement that said it
detects all of your nft s, for example, detecting all of your
ft's to me scares the crap out of me, partly.
Because we know that fissures will do are droplet attacks.
And so the airdrop you something that looks valuable, but when
you try to And it will give you an error message.
That's crafted to direct you to a phishing page things like
that. Not to mention, there's forms of
abuse, like, are dropping people lewd photos, you know, and, and
so, I actually think that, you know, it's a lot like an email
address where you don't actually want it to be public for anyone
to just add anything to your wallet.
So, I think that we have to eventually adopt Norms, where
people are consensually adding assets to their wallet, and I
think that that addition can come from anywhere So, for
example today, meta mask has VIP 747 and it's called The Watch
asset. So a website can say, hey care
about my token, you know, so I have a personal token called
dank dank coin, you know. Nobody has, I've given it out to
like 20 people, you know, it's a joke point, but you know, I'm
not going to add it to Some central registry where all metal
mask users have to see it. That's that would be ridiculous
in a waste of network bandwidth. But what we do have we have an
Method. Where, if somebody goes to my
website, they can press the add to my wallet button and then a
little pop-up appears. And if and it says, do you want
to add that to your wallet? And if the user agrees, now
their wallet will load. It has my eye, my face as the
icon, you know, and and they can use it snaps work.
Very similarly to that, when you're on a website that wants
to interact with, let's say another Block Chain or another
token sander that your wallet doesn't know about.
They'll just say, hey to integrate to interact with this.
This we recommend you have this governance module in your
wallet. And you say, okay and you know,
we're going to we're going to have a couple tears of security.
Obviously we're going to have like indications of who's
certified it. We're going to have a very
responsive kind of revocation and you know, fish are flagging
system and then the user is going to have the list of
permissions it needs, you know, the snap may need Network.
It may need a private key of its own, you know, some snaps may
even need a private key that's dedicated to a given protocol.
Like if Making another etherium sign or snap.
It might need your theorem keys. And so we're going to add.
We have friction on that to like make sure people are extra sure.
But ultimately. Yeah, there's a there's a part
of an interacting with a new entity that wants to rely on
some new kind of asset where they're going to say.
Hey you need this to work with us.
Once you have it though. You don't think about it
anymore. So it's a little bit like micro
wallet on boardings, you know, you can postpone them as late as
you want. But as you use web three more
and more, your wall. It will come to represent kind
of the places you go and the ledgers that you care about and
the assets that you track, and it'll just kind of let you use
those. And so it'll be a lightweight
wallet by default, but it'll be a dynamic wallet that can become
what you needed to be. Oh, I'm sure we'll see a lot of
innovation on that one to be seen in terms of visibility and
even reputation systems, right? So basically, yeah, I want to
cover one last topic when token when David an ha ha ha.
Okay. Yeah, so we've been exploring
making a grants. Do you know?
We want there's a lot of things that we'd love to fund and you
know, we've got a revenue model that's turning.
So we we want to give some back to the community.
So we are exploring how we might run, something like that.
If we do it, I would, I would stress.
We're not exploring distribution mechanics, that could be gamed,
we would start with small groups of trusted people and we would
probably take an iterative approach similar to what
optimism is done, where, you know, distribution can be
continuous. And I think that more
communities should embrace continuous, you know, continuous
recognition of community and A judgment and I don't think
things like that. Need to be a one-time event.
But but, you know, we're exploring that and, you know,
grants is one application. Obviously, we have lots of ideas
of what tokens can be used for in the truth is they can be used
for a million different things. And I also think people should
kind of get off the idea that tokens need to be a singular
great thing. Right?
Just because somebody makes a grand style doesn't mean they
never have another thing. They want to make.
I saw a whole rekey portal that. Did a review of metal mask.
They were criticizing an idea. I had once about, Julia
tokenizing or prioritization backlog.
Just wanted to let our team kind of help weigh on our backlog.
You know, we got a big backlog but they're like, they're like,
oh this is not of. Is this the most valuable thing
they could do is like get off that we can have tokens about it
as many things as we want and it's all good, you know, but but
you know, I think the key thing is we're never going to like
watch out for the scam Bots. I'm so apprehensive about People
start speculating that we have a token coming because, you know,
they're like, oh well now they're suddenly looking out for
somebody saying hey, there's a here, redeem your airdrop.
Now, I promise you. If you ever have access to
metamath tokens, it will not be because somebody replied you on
Twitter telling you to follow a link.
Don't follow links. I mean for crying out loud, if
you're a metal mask user you might think that we'd have like
a way of getting in touch with you, right?
So probably just like go to the wallet as your source of
information about Metal mask. And that goes for support, as
well as any any other things like that.
So, if you, if you ever need support with any product, really
start in that product interface, don't go search in Twitter.
Don't go searching telegram. Who does no moderation search in
the product start with your root of trust.
What's the thing? You trust?
Most on that thing? It's probably the product maker
themselves go from there. So, stay safe out there.
We'll play around with tokens because we want to play around
with the whole ecosystem more. But, you know, please donut,
don't hinge your hopes and Is on on the prospects of flipping it
or something. Yeah, I think that's, that's a
great way to wrap it up with the totem.
Then thank you so much for coming on.
It was like super informative. It took like a way different
turn that I personally expected it.
I learned a lot and I hope our listeners to and we're, we're
looking forward to seeing all these new new things coming from
from Adam asked and what people will build with it.
Then where can people come and learn about meta mask.
Well, we have a Discord Channel run by consensus, and we have a
community Forum which is a, you know, you can vote on features
there. You can also follow us on
Twitter. We've got, you know, a fairly
active sort of thing. You can you can add us but be
aware that there will be some scam reply Bots, we are working
on it. But you know, if anybody claims
to be giving support publicly don't listen to them.
Yeah, so you can ping us on any of those would be fine.
The community not metamath videos are Four.
Perfect. Thank you Dan.
It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on.
Well, thanks so much for having me.
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