Joseph Lubin

I am honored to be asked to be a torch bearer for the run up to the 10th anniversary celebration of Ethereum's launch and non-stop, essentially flawless, operation of the protocol -- even as the protocol underwent many major upgrades "in flight" – without missing a block.

Wow. Thanks for finding that. Lots of the ideas hold up and are taking shape.

With MetaMask Agent Wallet (which runs on the command line), if your agent hallucinates and tries something you have not permitted explicitly in the policy you set, it is guardrailed from executing that action. Liability is a design problem before it's a legal one. The fix is to make sure an agent can't spend outside bounds the human set in the first place. That's how MetaMask Agent Wallet works: - Like everything we offer in MetaMask, it is self-custodial. You hold the keys and can export them anytime, no exchange in the middle. - You create the rules at setup: daily spend limits, allowlisted protocols, risk profile. These guardrails are enforced onchain — not by a single actor or exchange that can change the terms on you. - The default configuration is Guard Mode: a rolling 24h outflow cap plus allowlists for protocols, networks, addresses and token recipients - Anything outside the user-defined and wallet enforced policy pauses for one-tap 2FA by push or email, and auto-declines after 5 min - Every tx is simulated first, threat-scanned by Transaction Shield (with Blockaid) and MEV-protected. Malicious txs are auto-rejected - Transaction Shield guarantees txs it deems safe against loss, up to $10k/month (terms apply) - Works with any agent framework (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and more), across EVM chains, Hyperliquid and Solana From metamask.com/agent-wallet: "CEX-based agent wallets often keep your agent within a single exchange and hold your keys. Other self-custody agent wallets can treat transaction security as optional. MetaMask Agent Wallet is the only agentic wallet that is fully self-custodial, multi-chain, framework-agnostic, and ships with mandatory transaction security on every move."

Ethereum's superpowers: - credible neutrality - censorship resistance - self-custody - reliability -- 11 years non-stop uptime - guaranteed execution of well-formed transactions and smart contract-based programs Ethereum is rigorously decentralized protocol-based trustware. Centralized crypto is a stepping stone to aa properly decentralized future.

100% Here is one rationale for an abundant decentralized future: teapawt.net/ethereumJoseph/status/…

Commanding Heights is either a fragmented thoughtful analysis or a hit piece on certain kinds of technological progress, or both. Commanding Heights views the current evolving societal paradigm shift through an outdated vertical lens. Decentralized protocols add horizontal organizing principles to top-down command and control creating a sturdier, smarter, wealthier and more real-time connected social fabric. The result isn't a few owned heights but omnidirectional, fractal expansion, with firms shrinking on average and every person a prime mover in their own contexts. "Own the rails or pay those who do" assumes the rails must be owned. We're adding horizontal organizing principles, via rigorously decentralized protocols, to the age-old top-down command and control architecture of the global economy and society. This Commanding Heights framing ends up serving the incumbent concentrations of wealth and power that have reasserted control with every past upgrade to the system of the world. It also assumes a bipolar US–China world and misses the internet nation, the network state and a possibly massively multipolar (read: more decentralized) future. Nation-states will use decentralized protocols and crypto, and some will craft their own permissioned DeFi. But global DeFi will move faster, with deeper liquidity and more powerful innovation. They cite Coase, and in this context Coase points the other way: the firm gets more granular. Large firms will fragment into spin-outs that serve their old parents or fill new niches. Firms will get smaller on average and far more plentiful. Many more people will become sense-making, prime-mover nodes, conducting their own team of agents, larger machine intelligences and other humans, on a credibly neutral trust layer like Ethereum that fosters real-time discovery, composability and frictionless coordinated collective actions. That's omnidirectional agile fractal expansion, not perpetual command and control with its inherent rigidities. We're becoming a hybrid human-machine cognitive apparatus for the planet, molting from poking at machine intelligence with our fingers into the hybrid organisms' next quasi-stable form. For a while, human needs/constraints, motivations and judgment will be a key rate limiter so while it will move fast it will remain manageable. Every human will be empowered to do what they want and build what they want. Every person will have access to world-class expertise in nearly every domain and to a credibly neutral, protocol-based decentralized trust machine: the modular Ethereum ecosystem. No one gets deplatformed or censored, everyone shares one source of economic truth about what happened and in what order, and everyone has unprecedented control over their financial life. And Web3 is under construction. It is the user-centric web, where properly privileged, often bespoke compute, crafted by machine intelligence, comes to our secure and private data, not the other way around.

Please DM @ethlabs_org or me if you are interested in contributing. Perhaps the best investment you can make in the future of everything you care about. @ethlabs_org and the @ethereumfndn have massively stepped up the pace and impact of innovation with the aid of machine intelligence, formal verification and ZK proof tech. Legacy infrastructure is breaking. We've been talking about the need to move to sounder decentralized infrastructure and self custody for years, but it was too abstract for most to grok. Now everyone in tech and finance is getting it. Machine intelligence and accelerating quantum computing breakthroughs are making it clear that the current information architecture of the world is brittle and unsustainable. The world needs a new rigorously decentralized, protocol-based foundation for trust based on strong cryptography. Ethereum is that global trust machine.

Coming up for air now after a very dense excellent week in Seoul at KBW, while staying on top of our response to a security event affecting part of our infrastructure. I can now respond to queries and speculation regarding what is impacted and what is not affected. Based on our investigation to date, there is no indication that MetaMask wallets or customer funds in wallets have been affected. Your Secret Recovery Phrase, your keys, and the assets in your wallet were not part of this incident because they CANNOT be. You custody and control your own keys. That is how self custody works. You are fully in control of your own money in MetaMask. Like many providers in our industry, we constantly face attempted attacks from a range of threat actors and periodically encounter security issues. Our approach follows established best practice: we do not publicly discuss the details of an open incident, but we disclose promptly to partners and relevant stakeholders once an issue is sufficiently understood. In this case, we shared the relevant details with partners, agreed and implemented a response strategy together, and then disclosed publicly. As a precaution, we and our partners rotated validator keys. That step is operationally inconvenient which is regrettable as validators must exit the staking queue and then re-enter the queue to restake, which takes time. The validator staking architecture of Ethereum separates the key that proposes and attests from the key that can withdraw the stake. In accordance with the Ethereum principle of self-custody, we do not hold withdrawal keys for our clients. Because of that separation, an issue in the validator infrastructure CANNOT result in the improper movement of the underlying ETH. Rotating those keys was how we reduced residual operational risk. Self-custody and user control are a central design principle guiding how we build -- in MetaMask, in staking and validation, and across Ethereum more broadly. Self custody plus rigorous decentralization represents a paradigm shift in security. Increasingly, the world is waking up to the benefits of this sounder architecture.

Joseph is naming the real battle here: not another fintech feature war, but who owns the agent that sits between every human and their money. Spolier: it has to be you. Our stack is now stablecoins + tokenized assets + DeFi + agents. Open rails and verifiable agent identity (and reputation, see Ethereum ERC-8004 -- Trustless Agents) are how that stack stays a commons instead of a new set of siloed walled gardens partitioning the financial system. $1T of agent-handled financial activity by 2030, $4T by 2035 — and hundreds of billions returned to people via fee compression — only works if the agent serves the user, not the platform. Web3, the emerging decentralized world wide web is (finally) the user-centric web, after all. Ethereum is all about credible neutrality and censorship resistance. MetaMask's Open Money OS (metamask.io/news/metamask-ne…) focuses on empowering users and communities with financial agency -- full control over all aspects of their financial lives. Sharplink grows share value as it grows ETH and Ethereum ecosystem value as it invests its permanent capital in the emerging Decentralized System of the World. Very much worth reading the entire article.

For over a decade, our teams helped build the foundations of Ethereum. MetaMask grew out of that work with a simple bet: people should be able to interact with Ethereum directly and control their own assets. Ten years later, MetaMask has become the world's most widely used self-custodial wallet. And self custody has become a foundational primitive for our ecosystem, and soon for the world. The original MetaMask vision has grown into something much bigger. We're building MetaMask into a place where people can hold, spend, trade and grow their money on open rails, while remaining in control. Becoming an independent company gives MetaMask the focus to take that vision much further.

"America won the internet because software developers weren't afraid that they could be put in jail for creatively exploring new application realms that would enable people and companies to work and communicate differently than what was possible before the internet, web and mobile eras.  BRCA is necessary for America to retain its position in the world.  Blockchain and AI move faster than any tech or industry in history." And AI operating on decentralized rails and making use of different forms of digital assets will drive the most profound positive disruption and acceleration in human history. We are at a major global societal inflection point. America needs to land on a thoughtful bipartisan approach to crypto legislation because it is becoming clear to leaders in the traditional finance space and to captains of industry that the global economy will soon largely run on decentralized rails. America must remain front and center driving this positive disruption and acceleration, not routed around as value seeks smoother safer channels through which to flow.

You're growin' up fast, kid. I remember when I could fit you on my laptop and bounce you on my knee. Could never get you to sleep back then. Still nobody can. Gonna get you a nice ZK prover for your birthday. Happy 11th.

MetaMask is 10 years old today. It's an opportunity to reflect on how far we've come as an ecosystem, and on the millions of people who have used MetaMask to build a new economy on open rails. For MetaMask's birthday, instead of telling our story, we want to help you reflect on yours -- because MetaMask is about personal sovereignty and financial agency. ten.metamask.io

In my opinion, Ethereum L1 revenue fees should stay low to foster growth. Tens of thousands of companies will set up shop over the next 2-3 years on some mix of Ethereum L1, L2s, and private permissioned EVMs like Besu chains which will be fully interoperable with L2s and L1s. Monetary premium will grow very large, "fee revenue" to L1 from so much activity will grow significant, staking and other locking away of ETH will reduce supply, and net burning of ETH under ultrasound conditions will further grow the value of ETH.

On this MilkRoad podcast with John Gillen (@BitcoinJesusETH) and @joechalom, I mentioned ETH as both ultrasound money and as the highest powered money on the planet. And then John mentioned two "high powered" organizations that have recently emerged to grow the Ethereum platform. Here is a bit more on these topics. Some people outside the Ethereum ecosystem scoff at the idea of ETH as ultrasound money. Ethereum is building towards a future in which most economic activity is onchain, so has been focussed on massively growing modular scalability and ensuring that transaction fees are as small as possible, with the understanding that certain kinds of transaction fees, especially at Layer 1 will inevitably end up being expensive when Layer 1 becomes used mostly for high value activities and becomes deep infrastructure. As my colleague Joseph Chalom has pointed out, this is the same early-growth-over-near-term-profits strategy that has led to massive adoption by companies like Amazon. Many accept gold as sound money. Many also accept Bitcoin as sound digital money, given the idea that there will only ever be 21 million BTC issued and that BTC is currently disinflationary. As the Ethereum economy grows and accelerates, more and more ETH will be held tightly, staked, and consumed in everyday business activities. Increasingly Ethereum will become globally systemically important just as the internet and web technologies have. And ETH will become systemically important to hold and use for nation states, financial institutions, enterprises and individuals. In the near term, the Ethereum ecosystem will bounce back and forth for a while between its sound money state and its ultrasound money state. In Ethereum's sound money state it will act like Bitcoin with ETH serving as a disinflationary currency. In its ultrasound money state, ETH will be deflationary, a great characteristic for a collateral money to possess. Eventually the Ethereum ecosystem will remain in its ultra sound money state permanently as the amount of ETH burned in transactions will be larger than the amount of ETH issued to process transactions and secure the protocol. And since many transactions in the Ethereum economy will involve stablecoins in different forms including properly decentralized stablecoins, the numeraire and means of payment functions of money will be mostly handled by these stable value instruments. Central bank issued fiat money is often called high-powered money (aka the monetary base, or M0). M0 refers to the total amount of highly liquid currency issued by a country's central bank. This form of money is "high-powered" because it's the foundation of the broader money supply created through the banking system's credit creation mechanisms. I like to think of Ethereum as the highest powered money on the planet, but in a different sense: - Gold and BTC are high-powered money in various senses, but ETH goes beyond. - Like gold and BTC, ETH is not debt-based (or credit-based) money. - Like BTC, gold and silver that you hold physically, transactions involving ETH on Ethereum Layer 1 are uncensorable, whether these are simple payments or complex smart-contract-based programs being run. - Like BTC, ETH is relatively cheap to hold and store securely. - Ethereum is inexpensive and easy to use, regardless of how much value is involved, e.g. whether a transaction transfers $1 of value or $billions. - ETH is disinflationary and will become ultra-soundly deflationary. - ETH is diversely useful and rapidly mobile collateral money. - ETH and BTC cannot be used by a despot of a nation state to financially exploit or financially repress the citizenry. This is likely to have positive geopolitical ramifications over time. - ETH is programmable money. You can attach arbitrary logic to transactions. You can build an entire economy on smart contract-based agreements and business processes. (See Shodai Network.) - ETH is the base money of an exponentially growing ecosystem that should see growth for decades. As such its current monetary premium will continue to grow because everyone will have to hold some. Some of the current monetary premium of ETH is speculative, because despite how dominant Ethereum is in the smart contract-enabled blockchain ecosystem, it has not yet hit its stride. - Machine intelligence is going to supercharge every scientific and technological pursuit and grow global GDP larger and faster than any of us can imagine. And it will be Ethereum L1 and modular Ethereum L2s that undergird the bulk of the important high-valued agreements, transactions, payment flows, and complex business processes on which the next generation decentralized economy will run. In the episode, John Gillen referred to @ethlabs_org and @ethereuminsti (Ethereum Institutional) as high powered organizations. What he meant by that is that they are both non-profit, credibly neutral stewards and builders of the Ethereum protocol, network and ecosystem. Ethereum is a sovereign network that cannot at this point be shut down, corrupted or co-opted by powerful nation states, unless they exercised unreasonable and catastrophic measures. The transformation that hybrid human-machine intelligence operating on decentralized infrastructure will effect over the next few years and decades for financial, social networking and governance activities is unfathomable. Governments, big money and big business have now accepted this. Not financial advice.