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

Hey Bankless Station, 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. This is a solo podcast. It's just me. David is off partying at some events, I think, right now. I'm about to join him, 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 uh as we go through this episode. So, guys, we're gonna 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. We don't do paid content. 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. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made it possible, including 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. Dan, how are you doing, man?

Oh, I'm uh euphoric. I'm walking on a cloud, and then of course I'm excited to get back to work and uh do even more tomorrow.

You know what? You look like you are literally in paradise right now because the scenery behind you is absolutely phenomenal. So I am for 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. How are you managing that?

Yeah, well, I I just plugged it into the the tree and I you know, I I knew that I was coming on Bankless and you guys you guys are always the best about kind of flexing your green, you know, like other yeah, other crypto podcasts, they flex their their their green and then you guys flex your green.

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

Especially my uh podcast co-host. He will be very proud of this uh shrubbery behind you, and I'm sure you can name every single plant. But we're not here to talk about plants. We're here to talk about MetaMask snaps. Okay. What are MetaMask snaps, Dan? Why are they important? Why are they exciting?

Well, they're kind of like plants.

Um in your wallet. So you know how uh I'm sorry, I did not prepare this metaphor, but let's see, let's ride it a little.

No, let's go with it.

Um

Yes.

so you know how your your uh 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 and when when it does bad and you have a lot of microplastics in your blood or whatever, there's a lot of fishing or whatever, you're like, well, why won't you know, why don't the devs fix this? And um, you know, what what you might like to do is, you know, know your ingredients and kind of curate yourself a 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. And uh snaps are kind of like that. They we're taking the wallet experience and we're kind of making it a collaborative development uh 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 uh 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 um, and then there's uh how to uh keep a person safe or how to interact with new uh 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 safety providers. And now when you're confirming a transaction, you can have additional third parties helping you stay safe. And you're you're all opting into these, right? Like they some of them may phone home and you get to decide whether they get to or not.

Some of them are doing simulations, some of them are using AI analysis, some of them are using on-chain registries and court systems like Claris. And um

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 uh, and then there's a whole bunch of new uh

blockchain protocols that we were able to support now. So there's like

supporting like 21 new blockchains or something, um, just you know, as of yesterday. Um 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 uh very very and a very exciting launch. I know this has been a long time in coming, which I I think we should uh 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 uh 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 uh kind of like permissionless, like any third party can basically develop it. Indeed, MetaMask is one of those extensions inside of a browser right now. And this is essentially bringing extensions, the ability to of third parties to launch extensions onto uh into MetaMask. And that's what a snap is. 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 uh 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. Um, and you can you can glow up your wallet with these kind of more custom, more niche type experiences, maybe some power tools.

Snaps can basically be anything. Is that uh uh is that a decent mental model? Like, you know, browsers have extensions, well, MetaMask has snaps.

Yeah, yeah, that's basically spot on. There's like two 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 uh, you know, probably a mixture of DAO and Web of Trust, something like that. Um, we'll be, you know, reaching out and probably expanding the conversation wider soon. Um

And and also they can't do anything. What they 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 three major ways that we're letting Snaps expand the wallet. So one is that transaction security thing I described.

Another is basically

adding uh

Integrations. So it uh be the ability to sign and show confirmations to the user and

uh add additional APIs to the user's wallet. So now when you're logging into a site, the site can interact with one of your snaps. It's not just the API that MetaMask shipped with.

And then the last one is uh notifications. Um and we've we've got a snap from the uh push protocol.

So any DAP 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 uh to participate in that.

Well, very cool. And that's why Henson in your intro, I think you said you're you forked today, but you're back in the office tomorrow, continuing continuing the work to build this out. Um, but let's let's get right to the goods right now, because I know there are a lot of MetaMask uh listeners, uh a lot of MetaMask users that listen to bankless, I should say. Uh and so right now, what can listeners do? Of course, this isn't all the snaps that will will ever be. This is uh in beta version, but there's already like over 30 different snaps that people can use and download. So I am uh showing on my screen now at snaps.metamask.io all of the different uh snaps that one can activate. So tell me how this works, okay? Um I'm seeing a directory here, I'm seeing a button with categories like interoperability, notification, transactions, insight. I have the ability to search. There's all of these various snaps. Uh, as a user, where do I start? Well, like what do you recommend, Dan?

Yeah. So the system is designed so you can get these contextually. So, you know, MetaMask was always kind of built to enable DAPs. So that doesn't really change here. If a DAP out there wants to interact with Bitcoin or now uh what Aptos or Algorand or whatever, you know, there's many new protocols were added here. Um, they can now ask you to install this app. They can say, hey, do you want to participate in that protocol? If so, add that to your wallet. And there you go. Now you're good to interact with both all of your Ethereum accounts and assets and all the uh accounts and assets you might have on this new protocol.

But in terms of this uh directory, uh that's that's kind of why I mentioned the transaction insight stuff. I think I think that's the one that's really great for using this page for. Because if you go to that filter and you you uncheck the uh

the compatibility and the 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 one might just keep you safe from phishing later. You know, uh next time you know Vitalic's uh Twitter gets hacked, the first one of these organizations to flag it could be the one that keeps you safe.

Right. So I kind of think of security. So, you know, there's a lot of ways of uh modeling security, but the one way

you could take this one as is it's like the spider web model. You've got a lot of strands and any one of them getting agitated could rattle you and lock you up, uh, keeping you safe from making a bad decision.

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

Okay, so I've got um this set up. It's it it I'm looking in the directory just the for the transaction types of snaps. I see this one called tenderly preview, for instance. I'm just picking one, you know, out of the out of this list here. There's tons here. There's SafeRoot, there's Web3 Securities Wallet Guard. Uh and so if I click this, uh then I go to the tenderly transaction preview. I can click a button that says add to MetaMask. Tell me what this one specifically does. This tenderly transaction preview, adding to MetaMask. I'm I'm seeing the trend uh the description here. It says preview transactions before sending them on-chain. So this is some um much needed functionality. I've used uh a separate extension in the past called Fire to do some of this, where I get a MetaMask uh, you know, kind of transaction, and Fire like looks at it and is like, oh, this is what it really means. Um is tenderly is 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, what is

Yeah, you're you're yeah, you're exactly in the right wheelhouse. Tenderly and fire are both performing transaction simulation. So they're they're looking at the transaction you're you're considering and they're helping, they're trying to estimate what the results of it are going to be.

Now, now I I like to stress this this strategy is not perfect. And that's part of why you know we've kind of

Spent more time making sure we we could accept many strategies and putting it all in on this, but but it's it's really powerful because you know, many interactions, it can catch and it'll say, hey, look, this is gonna make you lose all these tokens. And you may not have meant to do that. And that might be obviously

um, you know, dangerous to you. The the the catch is if if these become extremely popular, there are ways, you know, that fishers can make little trapdoor contracts that look like they're not gonna do anything that they can't.

So it's not perfect. This is a cat and mouse game. The fishers are gonna adapt, but it's better than what we have, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And especially when you've got a stack of these, right? This is in in uh security, sometimes we'd call this the Swiss cheese model, right? If you can each one of these may have holes in it, but when you start stacking them up, the probability of one thing fitting through all the holes gets smaller and smaller. And uh so, so hopefully, you know, uh, you know, and we're gonna be watching the the analytics closely, you know, keeping people safer is one of our kind of key goals uh right now. And so I'm I'm really, really eager to see how much uh any one of these can people can keep people safe. And it'll be incredible if we start getting data on what strategies are actually the most effective. And um, yeah, I think this is gonna be a really valuable tool uh in combating phishing and and also inviting new strategies to the table. I I don't think that every possible strategy here is accounted for at all. Um, you know, uh my co-founder Kumavis uh and I yesterday were talking about how the need to have like a web of trust component that's user rooted. Um, you know, there's no certificate chain solutions here, as far as I understand. There's uh multiple simulation, multiple AI, and Kleros is the the most Taoish one. So that's a that's a fun one uh for sure. So yeah, looking forward to seeing how these all work uh you know in in tandem.

I think the cool thing about this model is, and it sort of reminds me about Ethereum's like of Ethereum's layer two strategy, is um rather than Ethereum having to develop everything on the execution layer, now we've got, you know, dozens of layer twos and soon hundreds of different uh app chains that are doing their own development and pushing the ecosystem forward. So rather than just one 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 uh 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 this is a building block towards that in in kind of the the wallet experience realm. I want to um go to another category here. So this is um interoperability. Okay, so tell me about that. And you were mentioning some other chains as well. So has MetaMask on multi chain?

Uh yeah, I think I think with this release, you can basically say we're multi-chain. These these snaps aren't enhancing the wallet in all the ways that Ethereum uh is able to. Um so right now you're not gonna see these show up in the main uh um uh asset list, for example. So each one 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. Um, you know, it's 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.

Um, but it does mean that you install one of these, you'll be able to go to a DAP that wants to interact with that uh protocol and it'll be able to propose uh 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 I shouldn't

I should also get more specific here, maybe, because I I said this is uh taking MetaMask multi-chain, but you know, I guess there's defin different definitions of of multi-chain, because MetaMask has already been multi-chain from the perspective of, you know, 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 two support, there's all sorts of different networks. But here, I I see a snap, um, A for Aptos. So that's the first one listed for the Aptos wallet. And so if I click that and I click add to MetaMask, what type of um snap am I going to get out of this? How does this glow up my MetaMask? Can I can I now use MetaMask on Aptos? Is that literally what this means?

Yeah, yeah. Those the sites on Aptos are going to need to have integrations, but um

I and and 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 DAPs that they're compatible with to make sure that this works uh with all the

all the dApps that their wallet works with.

That is very cool. So we've got uh Suey, we've got Tezos, we've got uh what else am I missing here in terms of other Starknet?

Uh Shapeshift over there has like actually like five different blockchains rolled into it. It's kind of like all the Bitcoin-based uh uh chains. So it's got your Dogecoin and uh Yeah,

Wait, the bit the Bitcoiners can use um MetaMask now.

they can I mean they don't have smart contracts, but you they they can use MetaMask. You know, uh Adap could propose a transaction to them. And

you know, I mean, I mean, heck, you know,

there every once in a while I hear people argue that you can write good smart contracts in Bitcoin, and maybe they just needed uh MetaMask like experience to do it. Um who knows?