What does MetaMask’s DAO and Token plans mean?

In the early morning of March 16th, Beijing time, Joe Lubin, CEO of Ethereum infrastructure development company ConsenSys, said that MetaMask will soon launch a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The new DAO will not participate in the management of MetaMask, but the DAO will provide funds for MetaMask updates, which will help MetaMask gradually become decentralized.

DAO will become a new challenge for MetaMask

As a browser extension and mobile application, MetaMask provides keystores, secure logins, token wallets, and token exchange services to global crypto users. It also has the function of testing Ethereum smart contracts, supports the most complete Dapp, and is compatible with hardware wallets Ledger and Trezor. These advantages make MetaMask the most popular crypto wallet and the most important infrastructure for Web3.

ConsenSys said in a statement: “ MetaMask now has more than 30 million monthly active users, up 42% in the past four months. The global user base relies on MetaMask to mint and collect NFTs, join DAOs, and participate in DeFi protocols. The United States, Philippines, Brazil, Germany, and Nigeria are MetaMask’s most active markets.”

This time, MetaMask's decision to launch the DAO also indicates that it is ready to decentralize power and allow users to participate in governance and voting. At the Ethereum Denver Conference last month, Jacobc, head of operations at MetaMask, further confirmed this idea: "We believe very much in progressive decentralization and doing this in a meaningful way over time - and in a way that does not grab cash,"

The crypto field has been pursuing "decentralization", but we cannot deny that the initial team formation and project development all started with "centralization". "Decentralization" is achieved in the gradual development process. The development and improvement of products and the stable use of users provide a strong guarantee for "decentralization". In this process, the team can gradually take back power and hand over responsibilities to users to achieve the form of DAO.

MetaMask has experienced massive growth over the years and has expanded its service scale. Not only has the number of its users surged, but its revenue has also soared. In October 2020, the team launched the "Swap" feature and charged 0.875% of the transaction amount as a fee, which also brought MetaMask's revenue to $200 million in 2021 .

These advantages of MetaMask also allowed it to survive the rapid changes in 2021 and maintain its leading position. At this time, the launch of DAO is also the beginning of its adaptation to the new environment and acceptance of new challenges.

MetaMask plans to issue tokens

The governance of the DAO allows users to be compensated through tokens, and decisions on protocol changes and treasury allocations also require token voting. Therefore, it is inevitable that MetaMask will issue tokens after launching the DAO. ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin also confirmed that MetaMask intends to issue tokens.

However, Jacobc, head of operations at MetaMask, tried to ease expectations of the event, saying: “This is not something we need to risk, and we don’t want to put our project under regulation or hand over governance to ‘airdrop farmers’.

In fact, MetaMask has been rumored to issue tokens earlier. Erik Marks, a senior software engineer at MetaMask, once said that MetaMask is open to token issuance and airdrops, but the team does not want to create tokens without use cases, so there are no immediate plans to issue them.

However, it now appears that MetaMask's launch of DAO can apply tokens to more use cases, and the issuance of tokens will also generate more value capture.

For ordinary users, the potential airdrop opportunity will increase the usage of MetaMask by the "Web3 population". If the airdrop details are as speculated by the public, the crypto world may usher in the largest (and most decentralized) airdrop.