MetaMask just released MetaMask Snaps at Permissionless II. Why is this such a big deal? Is this crypto’s “Chrome extension” moment? Is this how we onboard crypto’s next billion users? We welcome creator and Co-Founder of MetaMask, Dan Finlay on the show to help us explore all of these questions and much more. 

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
5:05 MetaMask Snaps Explained 
7:55 Extensions 
10:50 MetaMask Snap Demo
22:40 Sci-Fi Snaps
26:23 Mobile 
27:10 Chrome Extensions 
28:45 Permissionless Snaps? 
32:34 Snaps Multi-Year Journey 
38:28 Are Snaps Secure? 
42:55 What Info Should Snaps Have? 
46:30 Smart Contract Wallets 
48:25 Account Abstraction Wallet 
50:24 Safe UX 
52:50 What Devs Need to Know 
54:50 Closing & Disclaimers 

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RESOURCES

Dan FinIay
https://twitter.com/danfinlay

MetaMask Snaps
https://metamask.io/snaps/ 

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Hey, Bankless Nation, here I am from Permissionless 2 on why Snaps is a big deal.

MetaMask Snaps just launched at Permissionless, and I think you should know a little bit about it.

David is off partying at some events, I think, right now.

But before we do, I want to give you this episode on MetaMask Snaps.

This is like a browser extension only for your MetaMask crypto wallet.

And I think it unlocks a lot of potential.

We're going to talk about why it's a big deal, what you can do on it today, how you can glow up your MetaMask wallet.

And we have Dan Finley, who is the co-founder of MetaMask.

He's been in the space forever as the original Ethereum OG wallet.

And to see how MetaMask has developed is pretty exciting.

You can see the passion for which he has as we go through this episode.

So guys, we're going to get right to the episode.

But first, we disclose MetaMask is a sponsor of Bankless.

But of course, that's not why we did the episode.

We did this episode because this is an awesome product that you need to hear about.

We are long-term investors, not journalists.

There's a link to all Bankless disclosures in the show notes at all times.

All right, guys, let's get right to the episode with Dan.

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Bankless Nation, I am super excited to introduce you to Dan Finley.

He is the creator of MetaMask, and he's got something special for us today.

And then, of course, I'm excited to get back to work and do even more tomorrow.

You look like you are literally in paradise right now because the scenery behind you is absolutely phenomenal.

So I am, for listeners who can't see the visuals today, I've got this black background, looks very somber.

I found this little cloister at the Permissionless Conference to record this, whereas Dan somehow has a microphone like outside and he's got like beautiful trees and shrubbery and you know, green foliage behind him.

Yeah, well, I just plugged it into the tree and I knew that I was coming on bankless.

And you guys are always the best about kind of flexing your green.

You know, like other crypto podcasts, they flex their green and then you guys flex your green.

And so I thought I'd come on and flex mine.

Especially my podcast co-host, he will be very proud of this shrubbery behind you and I'm sure you can name every single plant.

Well, they're kind of like plants in your wallet.

So you know how, I'm sorry, I did not prepare this metaphor, but let's ride it a little.

So you know how your wallet right now, it's kind of just like a set of features you get from the store and you like hope the team made what you want.

It's like getting a box of processed food at the grocery store.

And when it does bad and you have a lot of microplastics in your blood or whatever, there's a lot of fish in your whatever, You're like, well, why won't, you know, why don't the devs fix this?

And, you know, what you might like to do is, you know, know your ingredients and kind of curate yourself a little bit more of a home cooked meal, maybe have a friend over and have them help you cook something nice out of your fridge.

They were taking the wallet experience and we're kind of making it a collaborative development, platform.

And so there's a lot of parts of the wallet that we've wanted to improve in the past that are really hard to do in a centralized manner, just as a single dev team.

There's just like, there are, for example, countless protocols.

Like every time somebody writes a new contract, it's arguably a new protocol.

And so representing it faithfully to the user is like actually a hard problem.

And then there's how to keep a person safe or how to interact with new run times and stuff like that.

And I think what we started realizing is the best people to build an interface to a new protocol are the creators of that protocol.

And so we created this system that basically lets external developers build kind of plugins for MetaMask and add support for their various gifts and ship them right to our users.

So Today, for a lot of our existing users, that looks like you can install some transaction and safety providers.

And now when you're confirming a transaction, you can have additional third parties helping you stay safe.

Like some of them may phone home and you get to decide whether they get to or not.

Some of them are using on-chain registries and court systems like Claris.

And basically I think any Metamask user should install a handful of those today from the groups that if they recognize any and trust any.

And, and then there's a whole bunch of new, blockchain protocols that we were able to support now.

new blockchains or something, just, you know, as of yesterday, And it's only going to be more as we as we make it easier to publish to the platform.

This is a big deal and a very exciting launch.

I know this has been a long time in coming, which I think we should discuss, Dan, how long you've been working on this and all of the effort that's gone into it.

But before we do, I want to give folks another mental model.

So we have the plants mental model, of course, and we also have the mental model, I think, that a lot of listeners will be familiar with, which is you have a browser, okay, and then you might use extensions on top of that browser to extend what the browser does.

Those extensions are kind of like permissionless, like any third party can basically develop it.

Indeed, MetaMask is 1 of those extensions inside of a browser right now.

And this is essentially bringing extensions, the ability of third parties to launch extensions onto into Metamask.

So you as a Metamask user today with your wallet, you have the ability to like glow up your wallet.

You can like go to the Metamask Snaps directory and you can browse through, I think there's like, you guys are launching with over 30 snaps, I believe.

And we'll get into some of the ones that maybe you're most excited about.

And you can glow up your wallet with these kind of more custom, more niche type experiences, maybe some power tools.

Is that a, is that a decent mental model?

Like, you know, browsers have extensions.

There's like 2 caveats that I'll disclose to kind of like bring us to ground.

Like, so, so the platform today as launched is 34 partner snaps.

So it's not full on permissionless open yet.

And we're actually working on what the designs for the final, you know, crack it open permissionless protocol is, you know, and, you know, probably a mixture of DAO and web of trust, something like that.

We'll be, you know, reaching out and probably expanding the conversation wider soon.

What they really are is, so they're a place we can do stuff, and then we kind of get to open, you know, kind of APIs to extend different parts of the wallet.

So today there's really 3 major ways that we're letting Snaps expand the wallet.

So 1 is that transaction security thing I described.

Another is basically adding integrations.

So the ability to sign and show confirmations to the user and add additional APIs to the user's wallet.

So now when you're logging into a site, the site can interact with 1 of your snaps.

It's not just the API that MetaMask shipped with.

And we've got a snap from the push protocol.

So any dApp now that wants to be able to get a hold of you can ask for permission to, and they can ask you to add the push snap to participate in that.

And that's why Henson in your intro, I think you said you forked today, but you're back in the office tomorrow continuing the work to build this out.

But let's get right to the goods right now, because I know there are a lot of MetaMask listeners, A lot of MetaMask users that listen to Bankless, I should say.

Of course, this isn't all the snaps that will ever be.

This is in beta version, but there's already like over 30 different snaps that people can use and download.

So I am showing on my screen now at snaps.metamask.io, all of the different snaps that 1 can activate.

I'm seeing a button with categories like interoperability, notification, transactions, insight.

Yeah, so the system is designed so you can get these contextually.

So, you know, MetaMask was always kind of built to enable dApps.

If a dApp out there wants to interact with Bitcoin or now, what, Aptos or Algorand or whatever, you know, there's many new protocols were added here.

They can now ask you to install the snap.

They can say, hey, do you want to participate in that protocol?

Now you're good to interact with both all of your Ethereum accounts and assets and all the accounts and assets you might have on this new protocol.

But in terms of this directory, that's kind of why I mentioned the transaction insight stuff.

I think that's the 1 that's really great for using this page for.

Because if you go to that filter and you uncheck the compatibility and the notifications, you just look at the transaction security ones.

Those are all ones that you could just install right off here today.

And each 1 might just keep you safe from phishing later.

You know, next time, you know, Vitalik's, Twitter gets hacked.

The first 1 of these organizations to flag it could be the 1 that keeps you safe.

Right, so I kind of think of security, so there's a lot of ways of modeling security, but the 1 way you could take this 1 as it's like the spider web model.

You've got a lot of strands and any 1 of them getting agitated could rattle you and lock you up, keeping you safe from making a bad decision.

So we're really treating this as a community effort, and we're eager to see how these different strategies and new companies are able to thrive in this kind of environment.

I'm looking in the directory just for the transaction types of snaps.

I see this 1 called Tenderly Preview, for instance.

I'm just picking 1, you know, out of this list here.

There's SafeRoute, there's Web3 Securities, WalletGuard.

And so if I click this, then I go to the Tenderly Transaction Preview.

I can click a button that says Add to MetaMask.

Tell me what this 1 specifically does, this Tenderly Transaction Preview, adding to MetaMask.

It says, preview transactions before sending them on chain.

So this is some much needed functionality.

I've used a separate extension in the past called Fire to do some of this, where I get a MetaMask kind of transaction and Fire looks at it and is like, oh, this is what it really means.

Is Tenderly, is this Tenderly snap doing something similar to that?

It's basically like before I sign a transaction, it's showing me some information about it.

Maybe it's putting some protection on top of my wallet.

So if it's a known phishing type of account, am I, am I, yeah.

Yeah, you're exactly in the right wheelhouse.

Tenderly and Fire are both performing transaction simulation.

So they're looking at the transaction you're considering and they're helping, they're trying to estimate what the results of it are gonna be.

Now, I like to stress this strategy is not perfect and that's part of why, you know, we've kind of spent more time making sure we could accept many strategies and putting it all in on this, but it's really powerful because many interactions, it can catch and it'll say, hey, look, this is going to make you lose all these tokens and you may not have meant to do that.

And that might be obviously dangerous to you.

The catch is if these become extremely popular, there are ways that fishers can make little trap door contracts that look like they're not going to do anything.

The fishers are going to adapt, but it's better than what we have, isn't it?

And especially when you got a stack of these, right?

This is in security, sometimes we'd call this the Swiss cheese model, right?

If you can, each 1 of these may have holes in it, but when you start stacking them up, the probability of 1 thing fit, fitting through all the holes gets smaller and smaller.

And so, so hopefully, you know, you know, and we're going to be watching the, the analytics closely, you know, keeping people safer is 1 of our kind of key goals right now.

And so I'm really, really eager to see how much any 1 of these can keep people safe.

And it'll be incredible if we start getting data on what strategies are actually the most effective.

And yeah, I think this is gonna be a really valuable tool in combating phishing and also inviting new strategies to the table.

I don't think that every possible strategy here is accounting for it all.

You know, my co-founder, Kumavis and I yesterday were talking about the need to have like a web of trust component that's user rooted.

You know, there's no certificate chain solutions here as far as I understand.

There's a multiple simulation, multiple AI and Kleros is the most Daoish 1.

So yeah, looking forward to seeing how these all work in tandem.

I think the cool thing about this model is, And it sort of reminds me of Ethereum's layer 2 strategy is rather than Ethereum having to develop everything on the execution layer, now we've got dozens of layer twos and soon hundreds of different app chains that are doing their own development and pushing the ecosystem forward.

So rather than just 1 group of really smart EF researchers, you get the entire, you open this up to the entire internet.

What is that quote, the smartest people don't work at your company?

It's like, there's so many smart people all around the world, and now they all get to help us extend this particular wallet and make users safer and improve the user experience for them.

This is, I think this is why this is so important is because this is a key step to doing the thing we're always trying to do, which is get crypto to a billion people, right?

This is a building block towards that in kind of the wallet experience realm.

And you were mentioning some other chains as well.

Yeah, I think with this release you can basically say we're multi-chain.

These snaps aren't enhancing the wallet in all the ways that Ethereum is able to.

So right now you're not gonna see these show up in the main asset list, for example.

So each 1 of these protocols has its own kind of like management dApp.

So that's kind of like, we bit that as some scope we kind of narrowed out, but we are working on this cool extensible UI model.

You know, it's really critical to us that when we make our UI extensible, that it's done really safely.

Obviously, security is like a first thought in everything we do.

But it does mean that you install 1 of these, you'll be able to go to a dApp that wants to interact with that protocol, and it'll be able to propose transactions to you and you'll be able to confirm them or deny them with as much comprehensibility as that snap is able to give to you.

So I should also get more specific here, maybe, because I said this is taking Metamask multi-chain, but there's different definitions of multi-chain, because Metamask has already been multi-chain from the perspective of other EVMs that it supports, right?

Of course, it's not just Ethereum mainnet anymore.

It's for a long time, we've had Polygon, Layer 2 support, there's all sorts of different networks.

But here, I see a snap, A for Aptos, so that's the first 1 listed for the Aptos wallet.

And so if I click that and I click add to MetaMask, what type of snap am I going to get out of this?

The sites on Aptos are gonna need to have integrations, but I'm not sure how that's going so far, but this is developed by the Rise Wallet team, which is a big Aptos wallet team.

And so my understanding is that they're working with the dApps that they're compatible with to make sure that this works with all the dApps that their wallet works with.

So we've got Sui, we've got Tezos, we've got what else am I missing here in terms of other

Shapeshift over there has like actually like 5 different blockchains rolled into it.

It's kind of like all the Bitcoin based chains.

Wait, the Bitcoiners can use MetaMask now.

I mean, they don't have smart contracts, but they can use Metamask.

You know, Adapt could propose a transaction to them.

And, you know, I mean, every once in a while I hear people argue that you can write good smart contracts in Bitcoin and Maybe they just needed a MetaMask-like experience to do it.

Okay, so how about this 1, notifications?

Push Protocol is a peer-to-peer push notification system, and it's consent-based, so it basically just adds an API to your MetaMask, so now dApps can ask for permission to get your attention later on.

And so if they do, then they can ping you in your MetaMask later via the push protocol.

And yeah, so it can get you some notifications.

1 of the examples I saw of that so far is 1 of the transaction insight snaps from WalletGuard actually.

It'll let you know if any contracts that you've issued allowances to are now known as vulnerable.

And so they'll like encourage you to issue revocations.

So that's 1 example of a push notification keeping you safer.

And obviously you could use it for like renewal notifications or bid offers or the other 1, there's a chat system using it.

So yeah, it's, you know, each 1 of these, the fun part is of course, we like designing with a kind of set of use cases in mind and then people kind of abuse it and do fun and interesting things.

And long-term, I suspect that's where some of the best stuff will happen.

But yeah, even the stuff we've got here is pretty, pretty cool.

Dan, was this like a sneaky way to like, you know, 10X or 100X your dev team?

Because I feel like now you can do a lot more development of features that people have always been asking for and you've always wanted and just haven't had the time to prioritize.

Like you said it earlier, you said like, hey, this is kind of like the Ethereum model.

In fact, I almost felt like because Ethereum is so open-ended, there almost wasn't another way.

See all Bankless transcripts on Youtube

Why MetaMask Snaps is a Big Deal with Co-Founder, Dan FinIay