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In this conversation, we chat withDaniel Finlay - Co-Founder of MetaMask, and Dean Tribble - Co-Founder and CEO of Agoric. a non-custodial Ethereum wallet, allowing users to store Ether and other ERC-20 tokens and make transactions. Further. With the growth of DeFi and NFTs over the past year, MetaMask has increased in prominence as an entry point for novice users. So much so that its user base is now over 20 million monthly active users.
Agoric is a Proof-of-Stake chain utilizing secure JavaScript smart contracts to rapidly build and deploy DeFi, comprised of a team who are experts in smart contracts. Agoric was founded on open-source principles which look to build a public economy.
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1’46: Web3's evolution and challenges: A conversation with Daniel Finlay on MetaMask's progress and future
6’52: Exploring Web3's potential: The role of MetaMask’s developer focus, safety, and the innovative Snaps platform in shaping the future
11’20: Revolutionizing wallets and Web3: Breaking down the role of JavaScript and secure confinement in enhancing user experience and innovation
17’32: Expanding Web3 development: How JavaScript and lightweight sandboxing in MetaMask unlock new possibilities for developers
19’52: Enhancing Web3 security and usability: The role of hardened JavaScript in simplifying and securing the development process
24’00: Expanding developer horizons in Web3: Understanding the impact of Snaps in MetaMask for creating diverse and innovative applications
28’20: Unifying Web3 ecosystems: How MetaMask and Agoric facilitate seamless integration and cross-chain functionality for developers and users
37’12: Crafting the future of Web3 interfaces: How MetaMask, Snaps and Agoric are paving the way for advanced cross-chain connectivity and AI integration
Sneak Peek:
Daniel Finlay: …what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of support for new blockchains getting built. We're seeing support for new account types like contract accounts, MPC accounts. We also made an API to encourage the creation of security providers. So, people can now add comprehensions to other transactions. So, you can install a whole bunch of security providers, and now when you do something, you'll have a few security professionals looking over your shoulder and chiming in. And each one of these is just one way that we're able to expand the wallet, all thanks to having this foundation of this extensible kernel at the middle of the wallet. And so that lets the wallet be a lot more flexible and dynamic just like the underlying blockchain is. And I think one of our basic theses now is that you can't make a fully engaging wallet for a permissionless ecosystem unless that wallet interface itself is also permissionless. There's going to be the weakest link kind of problem.
Lex Sokolin: We'll talk about the analogy of the App Store and what's happened with other ecosystems that really benefited from the strategy, but it all sounds a bit like magic. So, for the less technical listener question to Dean, what does any of that mean? How is it possible that you could have a wallet that is meant to support Ethereum and EVM all of a sudden support Solana or Bitcoin? Where does JavaScript come into it? I mean, what's going on?
Dean Tribble: So yeah, JavaScript, it controls trillions of dollars every day. It's the most popular language on the planet. There was a paper that our chief scientist, Mark Miller wrote, published 2013, 2015, one of those two, I don't even remember, called Distributed Electronic Rights in JavaScript where it both painted the picture of sovereign services or... This was pre-chain of course, but sovereign services communicating with secure protocols in order to accomplish decentralized finance. But at the same time, it showed what features needed to be in JavaScript so that you could safely do smart contracts that way. And we'd worked for a long time in various venues on how do you do safe sandboxing? How do you do strong confinement, as it's formally called, strong sandboxes with limited authority. Hey, you can sign with my key, but you can't get Joe's key, you can't get to the network. And so the architecture of that has been reasonably well understood.
There's a secure operating system thread of design in the operating systems, KeyKOS, AROS, seL4, which is the current number one secure OS on the planet. The Midori operating system that I worked on at Microsoft were all designed around this model of pretty much object-oriented programming, but patterns for how to make that secure. And by driving the right things into JavaScript, you could use those patterns in JavaScript to be able to do…
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Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
