Joe Lubin on Turning MetaMask into a Self-Sovereign Neobank

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:08)
If you're just joining us now, this is CoinDesk Live brought to you by Hex Trust. We are coming to you from Consensus Hong Kong with our next guest, founder and CEO of Consensus and co-founder of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin. Joe, how's it going?

**Joseph Lubin** (0:21)
Great, thanks for having me.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:23)
Thanks for being here. Welcome to Consensus Hong Kong. Very excited to have you here. Just talk to us about what you've been up to, how are you experiencing the event so far?

**Joseph Lubin** (0:33)
So got here three days ago. Hong Kong feels to me a bit like it did, quite a lot like it did pre-COVID. I haven't been here in the last few years. I've been attending different events, interviews, lots of meetings, and this morning is the first time I've been walking the floor, and very, very TradFi, which is great, which is, I think, the theme that we at Consensus are experiencing.
In America, so we're interacting with and building with lots of financial institutions, in addition to doing what we do normally, which is build out MetaMask and other products, and essentially serve the real decentralized protocol ecosystem for retail.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:25)
I think I saw a photo of you on social media with Tom Lee. We shared it on the air earlier today.

**Joseph Lubin** (1:31)
It was in New York City, actually.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:32)
Oh, was that in New York?

**Joseph Lubin** (1:33)
Yeah, we saw each other at JFK on the way here.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:36)
Oh, wow.

**Joseph Lubin** (1:37)
We're actually on the same flight, which is probably not something that should be allowed.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:42)
Yeah, the two pillars of Ethereum on the same flight seems like a risk.

**Joseph Lubin** (1:46)
He's doing such an amazing job and I'm associated with Ethereum also. If there was anything untoward that happened, that would be bad.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:54)
Well, I'm glad that you both made it to Hong Kong safely. You're here.

**Joseph Lubin** (1:58)
Well rested.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:59)
Well rested and safe. That's all we can hope for. I know you're going to be speaking on stage later today on how DeFi will become FI. I think that builds off of a little bit of what you were just talking to us about. Give us a little bit of preview about the insights you're going to share on stage.

**Joseph Lubin** (2:14)
Sure. What we do currently is mostly focused on MetaMask, and MetaMask started life as what I like to think of as a digital authority tool, essentially enabling you to sign transactions and messages on Ethereum and other blockchain systems. It evolved to becoming a wallet, and that's how most people think about MetaMask, a wallet, a fully-featured portfolio manager. But over the last year, it's rapidly become a fully-featured financial services platform, a new kind of neo bank, but it's a different kind of neo bank than most old neo banks. So this is the kind of neo bank that you personally own and control, a neo bank that you can put in your wallet on your phone or on your laptop. And so we've been shipping so many features, in addition to on top of the wallet that everybody's used to. So we've been shipping hyper liquid perps, and equity perps, and polymarket prediction markets. And we like to aggregate, so we'll add more of these kinds of structures to the perp space and the prediction market space. We recently announced with Ondo Finance that we're providing access to tokenized equities. So Ondo is way out in front of everybody, and that's going to bring a lot of better access, not just to people outside of the US, but just different ways of interacting with equities, like instant settlement and being able to use the tokens as collateral in DeFi system. So it's a real revelation. We've got a debit card, we've got a stable coin, we have a rewards program. Maybe most importantly, our rewards program has had some early success in incentivizing people to use the different features on MetaMask, but we also have massive distribution. We're essentially over 100 million users on an annual basis. So protocols, DeFi projects, etc. are partnering with MetaMask, integrating with MetaMask and giving us tokens that we can share through our rewards platform to our users to drive activity.

**Bonnie Chang** (4:41)
Further, you talk about this feels very tread-fy. If you could go back to when you first started, is this what you would have imagined?

**Joseph Lubin** (4:51)
Yeah, so I was very optimistic. I got into Bitcoin very early, and Bitcoin had a lot of cataclysmic, existential things happen to it. And it was anti-fragile, Ethereum is anti-fragile. So it just kept cranking. And after a few of those, I recognized that it was so anti-fragile that it was going to survive and thrive and become long-term successful.