MetaMask will issue Tokens after completing financing, which may be the largest airdrop in history, but the regulatory uncertainty is huge

According to Decrypt, after completing a huge financing, MetaMask's parent company, which has 30 million monthly active users, said it would soon launch a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO, "which will not manage MetaMask, but it will provide funds for the creation of a new MetaMask". CEO Lubin did not provide more details or a release date for the DAO, but did confirm that MetaMask intends to release a token. Last month at Ethereum Denver, MetaMask's head of operations said that the release of the token would be carried out cautiously.

The release of DAO is also a preparatory step for MetaMask to issue tokens to a certain extent. MetaMask and its main users are all located in the United States. With its huge user base, it will inevitably be subject to extremely strict regulatory scrutiny, and it cannot be ruled out that it will be temporarily suspended like Libra. Therefore, its first step is to avoid accusations of securities tokens and switch to a governance token model similar to DAO. Once the token is released, the airdrop to 30 million or more users may become the largest airdrop in history.

MetaMask is very sensitive to US regulation. José Rafael Peña, who was previously noted as a former CoinDesk employee, said that Venezuelan IPs were banned using Infura in Metamask because "it cannot be used in certain areas in order to comply with the law", but it can continue to be used after changing the node. Later, according to Decrypt, the MetaMask blocking incident turned out to be a "misunderstanding". In order to comply with the new US sanctions plan, Infura is blocking access to all IP addresses in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, but due to a configuration error, Venezuela was blocked (now lifted). The blocked areas also include Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Syria. This also shows MetaMask's positive attitude in cooperating with US regulation. Other similar node service providers have not explicitly blocked IP access in Eastern Ukraine.

In addition, the parent company ConsenSys was previously sued by 35 former employees and requested a special audit, alleging that the company's transfer to a new entity in 2020 in exchange for traditional financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase investing a 10% equity stake and offsetting a $39 million loan, which harmed the interests of small shareholders.

On March 15, ConsenSys, the parent company of Metamask Infura, announced the completion of a $450 million financing, with a valuation of more than $7 billion. The funds received will be immediately converted into ETH. ParaFi Capital led the investment, followed by Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund, Microsoft, Anthos Capital, Sound Ventures and C Ventures. Metamask currently has 30 million monthly active users. It is worth noting that the investors are basically VCs from traditional industries. ConsenSys has always been an important support force behind Ethereum, and the outbreak of MetaMask also benefited from the development of Ethereum and EVM. This is also the reason why it rarely stated that "this round accepts digital assets and legal currencies, and converts them into ETH immediately."

The official also revealed data about MetaMask, the world's largest application in crypto: the wallet now supports more than 30 million monthly active users (MAU), an increase of 42% in just four months. The global user base relies on MetaMask to mint and collect NFTs, join DAOs, and participate in DeFi protocols. The United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Germany, and Nigeria are some of MetaMask's most active markets. However, in Chinese-speaking regions, the TP wallet market is relatively competitive; Phantom, with more than 1.2 million users on Solana, occupies an absolute lead; Coinbase Wallet is also continuing to exert its strength.

Officials emphasized that the funds will also support the rapid expansion of MetaMask, with a redesign scheduled to be released later in 2022, as well as the launch of a plug-in extensible system that will allow integration with various blockchain protocols and account security solutions. This means that MetaMask may integrate other non-EVM public chains such as Solana Polkadot in the future.

MetaMask has also begun to make some profits through built-in aggregate transactions. Decrypt reported that its daily revenue on the Ethereum chain is about 85,000 to 220,000 US dollars. Earlier data also stated that its revenue in 2021 was about 200 million US dollars. It is worth noting that this revenue is still very low compared with exchanges, mining machine manufacturers, etc. This also shows that the most profitable and successful business models in the industry are still centralized exchanges (contracts) and Bitcoin mining machine manufacturers. Although MetaMask has no pressure on capital costs after the huge financing, it seems that it has to choose to use Token economics, otherwise it will be difficult to go further in the absence of a commercial monetization model.

Read more:

https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/consensys-raises-450m-series-d-funding/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=consensys-raises-450m-series-d-funding

https://decrypt.co/95039/metamask-consensys-30-million-users