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.

We haven't seen real mainstream usage yet. We've seen people buying ETH and BTC to hold it speculatively. We've seen protocol and cryptography nerds build and evolve the protocol and continuously kick the tires on it. We've seen finance nerds build and kick the tires on DeFi. We've seen art nerds and collectors build and kick the tires in the NFT space. We spent over a decade growing usability, modular scalability, and affordability of block space and transactions. And we've recently seen regulatory uncertainty dissipate significantly with deeply thoughtful rulemaking from Chair Atkins and Chair Selig at the SEC and CFTC. But there hasn't yet been compelling applications for the mainstream. This is changing. One perfect example is the evolution of MetaMask from a transaction signing tool to a wallet to a financial super app in which you are in full custody of your assets and in full control of your financial life. That is going to be a game changer for people as the world grows more complex and less trustworthy. The TradFi industry is rapidly onboarding itself onto our rails. And when global decentralized finance is bigger, more fluid, significantly credibly neutral, self custody-based, and very inexpensive to use, we will see a wide variety of organizations, applications and retail users onboarded to our technology. In an era in which frontier machine intelligence can empower good actors and bad to rewrite all the rules of the global economy, a global, rigorously decentralized, shared source of truth that can serve as (1) a global digital asset settlement layer and (2) trustware that ensures proper guaranteed execution of transactions, agreements and processes, becomes essential.

Why ETH is the store of value for what's coming We are almost certainly heading into a period of high inflation and extreme economic and social volatility. As inflation and risk erode the purchasing power of nation-state money and many other assets, it will matter more than ever to hold assets that keep or grow their value. Gold and BTC are high-powered money and excellent stores of value. ETH goes further. Not debt-based. Like gold and BTC, ETH is not debt-based or credit-based money. Censorship resistant. Like BTC, or gold and silver held physically, ETH transactions on Ethereum L1 can't be censored. That's true for simple payments and for complex smart contract programs like DeFi, and those programs are guaranteed to execute. Cheap to hold. Like BTC, ETH is relatively cheap to hold and store securely. Cheap to use at any scale. Ethereum is cheap and easy to use whether a transaction moves $1 or billions. Any well-formed transaction is guaranteed to execute. Sound, and getting sounder. ETH is disinflationary and becomes ultrasound, meaning deflationary, during periods of high network activity. Broadly useful. ETH has many uses across the Ethereum economy, and that economy will grow by orders of magnitude as finance, and eventually every industry, moves onchain. Global adoption of the Web protocols in the '90s and '00s transformed the world economy. Ethereum is the foundation of Web3, the user-centric, decentralized web. Collateral money. ETH works as collateral, and collateral that grows in value over time is a powerful thing. Home of stablecoins. Ethereum hosts the bulk of stablecoin activity. Stablecoins serve as payment money and as unit-of-account money. Despot-proof. Like BTC, ETH can't be used by a despot to financially exploit or repress citizens. Over time that should have positive geopolitical effects. Programmable. ETH is programmable money. You can attach arbitrary logic to transactions and build an entire economy on smart-contract-based agreements and business processes (see shodai.network). Transparent or private, and auditable either way. Money and financial instruments on Ethereum can be public or private, and in both cases selectively disclosable and auditable. Privacy tools for retail and institutional users include VPNs, mix networks, shielded and privacy pools, Railgun, stealth addresses, Kohaku, and zero-knowledge proofs in many forms, including on L2s and on private permissioned EVM networks linked through bridgeless synchronous composability. Future-proof. By the end of 2027, or partway through 2028 at the latest, ETH will be quantum-safe and AI-safe money. ETH is the base money of an exponentially growing ecosystem that should keep growing for decades. Its monetary premium will keep rising, because retail, corporate, and government users will all need to hold some. Part of today's premium is speculative: Ethereum dominates smart contract blockchains, but it hasn't fully hit its stride or gone mainstream yet. Machine intelligence will supercharge every scientific and technological pursuit and grow global GDP bigger and faster than any of us can imagine. Ethereum L1 and modular Ethereum L2s will undergird most of the high-value agreements, transactions, payment flows, and complex business processes behind the coming hybrid human-machine decentralized economy.

1000%. These guys are super-elite thinkers, researchers and executors. But important to understand that they are both contributing to the EF's crops mandate as well as building out a ring of growth and engagement around the core backbone of the crops mandate. EF personnel, via leadership, cryptography team, quantum team and many others continue to do the right things and do them incredibly well. 2027 will be a watershed year for Ethereum. EF, Ethlabs and other core devs are aligned in defining the foundation of a quantum and AI safe credibly neutral platform for money and other financial instruments for the next economic super cycle.

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.

Ten years ago the idea that ordinary people could hold, grow, and spend their money on open infrastructure, without asking anyone's permission, was a distant goal. Now it's available to every user of MetaMask. It's time to turn your money on: metamask.io/money

And it stays self-custodial the whole way through. Your keys, your balance. Nobody, including us, can prevent your access to it. mUSD is backed one-to-one by dollars and short-term Treasuries, and it runs on Monad.

This is what open capital markets pay when no intermediary takes the spread. A bank lends your deposit out and keeps most of what it earns; here the return flows to the person who owns the capital. The era of the 0.3% savings account is over.

Money Account is a single self-custodial balance that earns up to 4% variable APY from open lending markets while staying fully liquid. You can trade, send, or spend from it at any time, and whatever you're not using keeps working.

For most of the last decade, the pieces of an open financial system have been built and proven separately: stablecoins for settlement, lending protocols for yield, self-custody for control. The MetaMask Money Account is what happens when you put them all together.