Dan Finlay of Metamask — Volume 2 Ep 02 Recap

Hello Awesome PUSH community, an amazing interview conducted by our founders ; Harsh and Richa and we would like to introduce to you the session where our guest was the one and only Dan Finlay

In this Session Recap, we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.

Richa — So, getting started…..what connects your wallet to the dapp and what is that one single software that has onboarded millions of people into the web3 space……..please welcome the OG of the space, the co-founder of metamask……please welcome the one and only, the person who gives the coolest obligatory poses, Dan Finlay of Metamask.

Richa — Hey Dan, how are you doing?

Dan — Hi, thanks for having me.

Harsh — Thanks for being here dan, yeah so, let’s get started with the interview.

Richa — cool, awesome dan can you probably get started by telling us a little bit about yourself and the coolest folks of Web3

Dan — Umm so yeah, just a real quick background because I’ve probably given the history a million times, so yeah i am a local of the bay area of california and i was more of a entertainer and actually i was making videos and stuff in my youth and then eventually you know from editing videos into programming apps and i eventually made friends with my co-founder Davis and he went to this meetup and learned about ethereum, we were co-working at that time and so we were talking a whole bunch about it and talking about how could you interact with an application where there’s no single server, where there’s no secrets anymore, users have to hold their own keys and you know we had some ideas then, and it sounded really easy at that time and so we were like “okay, we’ll make this real quick” and he had an initial version that was entirely in the browser, it was like a browser in a browser which was extremely ambitious but eventually we dialed it back to just being a browser extension and now we also have a mobile client and here we are and it’s almost 6 years later or i think from his original starting on the project it’s like 7 years and 6 years since we first shared it with the public and it’s changed a lot but not as much as i had liked and i’m sure everybody has a million features they’d like umm i think we really kind of unearthed a new product’s category, The wallet. I think the closest thing we had was like a password manager maybe but a wallet isn’t just typing in passwords, it’s actually like potentially giving individual consent you know, it’s got not just your account’s but it’s got the ability to perform actions on your behalf and the websites don’t have that ability anymore and so this real inversion of control, so now whenever you perform an action on a website it has a opportunity to ask the user for permission and so we get to be this cool little service on a person’s computer that gets their permission for stuff so i sometimes think about it as a little digital lawyer who sits on your computer and tells you “this website would like to do that, is that what you wanna do?” and you know like we are trying to then we end up trying to really bridge that gap because we have have put you know something some consent between them and somebody else’s idea of what to do with their money and yeah so that’s like a little micro background on the product category and obviously this last year and and um we did a lot to facilitate layer two networks we added apis that let make it easier to switch networks from an application so users can now use multi-chain applications without entering config values and settings like just by con sensing to things you can use applications that are cross-chain and we are not stopping there um we really do have a vision of the wallet as a truly multi-chain thing where people have accounts of all types people have different security preferences you know not everyone’s going to probably use their own um hotkeys for all of their assets you know obviously we have hardware wallets today um and there are also contract accounts today and now we’ve got you know a distributed signing you know multi-party compute algorithms and um i think there’s going to be a lot more and so we’re trying to build the wallet in a way that can facilitate ongoing experimentation in in all of those ways so that people really have the ability to choose the risk profiles that make sense for them um and so anyways it’s a obviously grown to be a much bigger project than we possibly imagined when we first heard of ethereum it sounded like it would be like rails like you write your logic now you make an app ta-da but the truth is there’s just so much more to it than that and um it’s been quite a ride and clearly there’s uh quite a bit more to go.

Richa — Yeah and that’s an amazing like uh you know look back at the future at the past and also sneak peek in the future so i just want to do a little time travel with you mentioned that you know you were creating videos so before meta mask and web 3 what were you doing and what led you to take the plunge in web 3.

Dan — I did a lot of things i have a almost i could probably bore you by listing all the weird jobs that i had i’ll tell you a couple weird ones i was a balloon twister for a little bit like so you’d be at a restaurant and i would go up to you and say would you like a balloon animal and then but i was a balloon artist like people would say what can you make and i’d say i’m a balloon artist you tell me what you’d like to me to make you know and so i got some good fun challenges there i had to make the starship enterprise one time or like the alien and predator and uh you know sometimes some good challenges but um i did a lot of improv comedy and um and then i was teaching computers at some art centers for a while um you know i really thought of myself as a communicator i had some background in my history that made me want to do something that was that had like social impact um but my best sense of how to do that was through communication so you know when things like the daily show came out for for a while i thought that was really going to be a big splash and then we go through all those years and it kind of felt like uh maybe just laughing at the problems isn’t enough um you know we need to actually build alternative structures for facilitating better cooperation um between people and and yeah i think that occupy wall street was also i think it was impactful for a lot of us um for me there was like simultaneous really mixed feelings like partly like hey look there’s a lot of this feeling out there a lot of people are discontent with the way things are there is a lot of will to help people out and yet it’s so chaotic and disorganized you know like the people’s mic like taking turns speaking regardless of you know no sense of priority or um you know or trust it just wasn’t good enough and i think a lot of people came out of occupy with the sense that like it’s like look we’ve got reddit we can upvote comments we don’t have to be sitting in a circle like taking turns talking we can definitely come up with a better way and so yeah i think um when i started learning how to write uh web apps was there was a recurring theme of like trying to make up better ways to debate better ways to make decisions together and i feel like a lot of the crypto space a lot of the web 3 space is kind of inspired from similar feelings like that it’s like frustrations with how untrustworthy the old systems have been and a desire to build something better.

Richa — That’s so cool and yeah completely like agreeing with it. I just wanted to touch upon uh that now that we know matamas has a common evm household name but every software every project has a humble beginning can you describe like maybe what was metamask uh like back then.

Dan — So when kumamba first learned about uh ethereum he was trying out a few different experiments he probably went through like three little experiments for what a wallet could be like his first one was like a terminal in the browser and i was like not user friendly enough at all and then the next one was the browser in browsers and that was uh it ended up being really hard to do um and yeah and so then we came up with the browser extension and yeah early on oh it was very janky we should we should definitely post screenshots from the early versions because the truth is we’ve gone through like four major reskins of metamask but sometimes people say like oh metamask hasn’t changed very much i really think that we’re like in a boil the frog situation people don’t notice all the changes that are happening but the first version um all your accounts had a walrus avatar um they uh oh the um the confirmations were uh little notifications from the browser so you couldn’t interact with them at all you could just accept or deny and so gas price was always just fixed there was uh you couldn’t import accounts or anything like that um we didn’t have any notion of tokens for the first like couple years or something like you know your c20 was an idea somebody was like this is a thing we should do and then and for a while i kind of had the opinion like look we’ve got a big enough job just showing confirmations like we could probably do confirmations like we could probably do that and then somebody could come along and make a dashboard app and show tokens right but eventually tokens just became so fundamental to what people expected were like okay let’s add them yeah and that’s probably me dragging my feet like i really do value like focus i think that there’s enough of us working on this stuff that we could carve out smaller pieces .

Richa — Yeah! sounds pretty cool and that’s a great sneak at the past in metamask i’d love to put those screens and also would love to see the walrus avatars.

Dan — Oh yeah! So yeah

Harsh — I would love to see those balloon things if you still have them.

Dan — Oh yeah, the blue yeah, yeah if i’ve got some pictures of them i’ll try uh tweeting one out if i can dig one up i mean i still have my balloon kit so i could probably just make like an ethereum logo or something you know or epns, we will see, will see.

Richa — That’s amazing, thanks for just coming back to the origin of metamask. How did the low poly design fox come into being, what is the origin of the name and the design?

Dan — uh! that was actually kind of a combination of different people so kumamba said had the idea of he’s like he wanted it to be an animal that was low poly that maybe evoked the letter m that’s that’s the prompt as i remember it and then he he shared it with a colleague of ours uh christian geria who then made a svg fox that was kind of looking to the side and it’s uh you know it was our original version one of the fox and then this was before i had actually joined so then i saw that and i was like oh it looks like it could be 3d so i was uh i was going to surprise him as part of my kind of joining the team and so i went on craigslist and i looked for 3d designers and i found somebody and i actually worked with them and it took like four drafts there’s actually they’re online somewhere where there’s like there’s like several versions of it as it kind of changes to what it became and uh i made it into a script where it would follow the cursor you know yeah so it was kind of i think we’ve been passing it around in the spirit of like improv you know a lot of yes and a lot of taking something changing it and uh making it a little better.

Richa — Also then uh would love to know you spoke about uh some alpha so would love to know what’s the coolest alpha drop that is coming up feature-wise in metamask now.

Dan — Uh yeah so something that’s cool that uh that probably just happened a couple days ago on january 18th if everything goes according to schedule um we will have launched uh something that we’re calling metamask flask it’s um a special developer distribution of metamask where we’re going to experiment with features that are a little experimental a little more a little more bold than we would usually push to all users and so developers are welcome to install flask as their as their metamask driver as long as they know how to backup their keys and are willing to do a little uh coding to um you know if they if they write an application that relies on it uh just assume that apis will break so you might have to yeah we’re we’re saying flask is for developers um we’re going to break apis but we’re going to do some fun crazy things and the first fun crazy thing we’re going to do on flask is we’ve got a version of snaps we started realizing that something this big inorder to get it to production needed to not be a long-running branch but needed to be built in a way where we can turn it on with a single flip of a switch and so that’s what flask is every feature on flask we can trivially transition into production and so uh in in flask we’ve got a basic version of snaps the first version is very simple it allows you to provide apis to sites uh display confirmations to users or alerts if you’re maybe something like epns as well as perform some cryptographic information with keys that are derived from the user’s secret recovery phrase so long term we’re going to be adding a lot of really cool apis to snaps letting you represent snaps-based assets in the user’s wallet ,adding new account types showing warnings or endorsements on contracts and and much more we have a lot of things that we think this is going to be useful for so we we really think that this is going to unlock um multiple layers of innovation that just were not open to before like in the past you had to build a whole new wallet from scratch if you wanted to do a lot of these things and so uh it’s been a lot of work it’s basically been the equivalent of building a new operating system kernel um so i hope that people can understand and be patient with us um but i think the reward is going to be great i think we’re going to make the wallet a much more versatile um tool

Richa — Tool that’s amazing and when can we expect the alpha drop to be you know ready to test and play around with.

Dan — By the time this errors you can go to flask.metamask.io and you can download it and try it out

Richa — Awesome amazing and like super so much respect for everything that you’ve been doing uh speaking of respect metamask has actually crossed 21 million active users and which is like a wow number for everybody so i just wanted to ask what has been the biggest challenge that you faced during this journey of you know this big huge metrics.

Dan — Uh the biggest challenge along the way uh i think i think it all becomes psychological at a certain point like like there’s a point like everybody knows this ecosystem does not sleep you know it is 24/7 and um in particular you know if you’re building if you’re building a defi app or a wallet your users have like financial uh you know things at stake and when there is a an outrage or there’s a bug or if there’s you know god forbid if there’s ever a vulnerability of any kind you don’t sleep you get up you do it um and so i think that there were some periods in the middle that we we hadn’t prepared for how serious this space can be at times um you know like i think you know just when we started it was like a hack yeah so the first year or two um like when the 2017 ico boom was happening that was a very hard period i think that we also had some hard periods where um you know it was like the bear season of like 2019 where people were starting to have some doubt we definitely weren’t getting funded the way we are now that we’ve you know created revenue um and so we were stretched then and we weren’t sure if this is because a wallet is a big project or if we were just kind of failing at it you know and i think that we’ve learned now that yes actually a wallet is a very big project and um we’re finally i think treating it with the seriousness that it deserves and we’re we’re uh yeah trying to make sure everything gets the the love that it that it needs you know there’s like so much creativity and innovation happening that uh yeah i mean maybe the hardest part is just like keeping up with it all it’s just like you know i mean not that not that any of us do but you’re trying to you can you can use yourself of just doing that.

Richa — absolutely hundred percent and like speaking of what uh you know there is always one feature in the project that is very close to your heart or even like for my heart in my project but people really don’t embrace it as much as you would want to so is there a feature like that uh with metamask.

Dan — yeah kind of i think i think there’s a couple features that we have where i think people don’t appreciate how they kind of complete a story um we’ve got we’ve got like these three features actually that i think make multi-chain long tail creativity viable on metamask so what we added is a library that’s an onboarding library so people can say oh get your wallet and we get the person set up and then link back to the site then we added an api that adds your custom network so if you’re on a layer 2 it says, hey this site uses blah blah you know chain would you you know would you like to switch to it or add it and then and then they do now they’re on that chain and then the third method is our eip 747 which is um add a custom asset too so then you can say we also use this token would you like to show that in your wallet and and so there what we’ve done is there with no central uh server nothing that can go down you know other than the site’s own uh networks and dependencies we’ve enabled a user to um arrive at a site without a wallet get it use a custom network and use an asset that nobody’s maybe listing um all just with clicks of consent and and to me that that’s really important we didn’t even introduce a central major list or anything we just let you go to a site and purely through the trust that you’ve got established with that link and and yes i’m saying there’s an act of trust when you visit a link don’t click links from people you don’t trust don’t trust links from strangers but upon visiting a link that you can trust we can we can fully onboard you to a tool a new ecosystem a new chain that is possibly as cheap as you can imagine and a new asset that somebody may have just made up minutes before and and to me i’m very proud of that.

Richa — Awesome awesome and i would love to know that you know what’s one of the maybe the coolest um experiments that you have seen in web 3 that hasn’t sort of wagged me yet but you think has a lot of potential.

Dan — i’ll i’ll give a shout out i just yesterday learned that i guess a project by rick dudley laconic after four years in stealth mode is about to come out it was inspired by a lot of the problems that infuria or like hosting ethereum nodes has where like everyone trusts this central node but now that central node has all the server costs in this one everybody helps save some state and they help gossip it to each other um i i like _____ safe uh add-ons like the they have a whole module system um you know what’s the zodiac uh kind of ecosystem i think is really cool because they’re making _____ safe as a contract account allows anyone to write a contract that plugs in and can act on behalf of that contract and so zodiac is a suite of these modules that are oriented at DAOs and so it’s kind of becoming a plug-and-play DAO system and um and it’s a very lightweight one so i you know love and respect uh like the ______ approach and stuff and uh you know and and colony and you know there’s like all these great experiments in dapps um but i really i like this one because it’s just doing such a good um like featherweight you know your know is safe it’s one contract module just add the modules you need you know it’s like and you know the nose to safe wasn’t even made for that you know i like seeing when people make contracts where they’re interoperable and they didn’t even have to be made together but they’re just they’re made so uh so well that somebody else can repurpose them i love seeing that kind of things.

Richa — Amazing!

Harsh — Yeah, awesome so and dan , i wanted to know like metamask, how do you guys decide like what feature should come on metamask or not like uh is there a thought process behind it we would love to know that.

Dan — yeah yeah yeah ideally it would all just be like public and open and available for others to like mutate and i know i have a doc running where i’m like where i put my like craziest like open decision making process ideas today it’s not that um it’s not that yeah let’s say like hash linked into centralized uh we’ve got a series of different documents these days a lot of the prioritization is actually happening in a notion although i do a lot of like um brainstorms on on _____ so github obviously has lots of issues and lots of feature requests and there’s so many i think we have like you know like 10 000 or something um and so what we try to do is we try to lump them into categories we try to list those categories and then we start talking about okay strategically which of these categories are like facilitating our upcoming goals and so just and then combine that with our long-term goals so we’ve got like long-term like i have a sense of what i think a wallet needs to become you know like in 20 years if we haven’t done that we kind of failed um but of course along the way we have to adapt to the current ecosystem we say oh it looks like you know the transaction fees are too damn high we really need to make sure that layer two is thriving right now so yeah so we combine our high level plans these kind of thematic we call like uh epics or initiatives uh use that to kind of prioritize the groups of issues that we’re doing on a quarter by quarter basis uh we do have a community page where we invite people to post feature requests so that’s ends up being one of those things where it’s like okay well that’s a feature that i’d like to develop alongside all of our other features and so now we have to decide whether you know how much energy we want to put on optimizing our process this or that which you know which is coming first um i think uh we have so many things that we want to do that uh even just laying them out can be uh an enormous task.

Harsh — That’s an amazing insight and thanks for uh diving so deep into it uh on that note like uh we spoke about like how you guys uh look into what upcoming features will come on metamask but metamask itself has so many cool features that not many people know about uh i want you to outline one cool picture of metamask which people haven’t embraced yet.

Dan — i don’t think people have noticed that like sometimes we ship features and people don’t even notice here’s two um people haven’t noticed that you can log in with multiple accounts and facilitate multi-account apps um so for example a portfolio dap like zapper or zaryan could ask for you to select as many accounts as you want they can they can view those and you can uh now interact with all those accounts at once um that’s a cool thing that basically nobody’s doing today also we added an encryption api so you can send encrypted messages to metamask users it does require them um providing a publickey first and then anyone can write encrypted messages to those keys and then we have a special method for decrypting those if you wanted to make a end-to-end encrypted uh messaging app or anything that incorporates absolutely secret messages to the user that’s an api that’s available today very few dapps have you know they use it in a creative way they don’t use it even in the way that it was designed naturally they’re hacking it um but uh yeah and not a lot of people using it to actually make uh encrypted messaging.

Harsh — Got it, that’s a signed message right ?

Dan — no that’s um it’s decrypt uh wallet decrypt method method i think

Harsh — Wallet Decrypt ?

Dan — Yeah, docs.metamask.io there’s some there’s some secret gems in there we’re going to be giving a lot of love to our docs uh in this coming year.

Harsh — Awesome uh all right moving forward uh then like there’s so many uh so-called chapter of wallet wars what’s your opinion on that?

Dan — Yeah so what do i think about wallet wars well there’s definitely more wallets today than there have ever been uh in our history and we knew when we built metamask we were building it on open standards you know the secret recovery phrase is an open standard and we did that so that people would have the option of using other tools that would work for them and yeah i think that there are a lot of there are so many things that a wallet could do and that a person might want a wallet to do that i think that there’s a lot of value in having many approach you know like naturally having contract accounts is like a must-have for some people and then having having a an account that is like maybe it’s more defy centric maybe it’s more nft centric you know everyone’s got their own sense of what web 3 is and i feel like every wallet developer is kind of bringing their own sense of that you know web3 is a it’s like a very very big concept and i think that uh metamask maybe it’s just because we were first uh or you know technically i guess like mist was first but you know they’re they’re not around anymore but because we were early and we’re kind of the oldest web 3 wallet i feel like we kind of have a responsibility to kind of play the middle where we try to enable as many different use cases as possible um we’re not over pandering to one community we’re not you know just trying to integrate the features that facilitate one use case you know but i think also when you start making a wallet that’s more entrenched in one use case um it can kind of compromise on the interoperability like when you go to another site now if that site wants to interact with the assets on that other thing that’s that’s part of the fun of web3 part of the fun is i can take my tokens from this sale i can take in this exchange i can bond them in this DAO i can back them on this nft you know you can go to different sites and you’re doing lots of different things with the same underlying assets and i think that kind of interoperability largely comes from having a wallet that is trying to facilitate the widest set of use cases and it’s totally the hardest thing to do anyways i think there’s a lot of uh creative approaches to wallets right now i think you know i see a lot of people taking a lot of approaches i still don’t see anybody that i think has like nailed why i’m in it and why metamask is doing it um and so you know i wish them the best of luck in meeting their needs um as wallets but i look forward to somebody doing what i have in mind better than me because then i can finally get some rest.

Harsh — that’s nicely put and uh i don’t think that’s not happening in the near future so yeah.

Dan — yeah lots of very different ideas that’s for sure.

Harsh — Yep Yep, awesome so dan um i would love to know what’s next for you what are the plans of 2022 and how do you see that evolving ?

Dan — uh 2022 well well we all know that it’s the uh year of layer two thread um and uh yeah but i think for us we’ve got we’ve got some big uh design changes and improvements in mind largely oriented at facilitating scalability we’re finally bringing ntfs to extension and we’ve got some nice extra features for nft lovers in the in the works we’re going to continue making transactions more readable um if we do it right we will try to get snaps to production and so metamask will be a fully not just multi-evm chain but maybe facilitating finally contract accounts and all sorts of other cool innovation i can’t wait for that looking forward to finally have syncing across devices possibly-possibly maybe finally get some proper social features although i think that proper decentralized social is a little bit harder than most people think i think it’s easy to just build a new web 2 social network on top of a wallet but i think that there are some things that if we want to make it a healthy ecosystem we should try to do right yea i think i think it’s going to be a big year for for improving scalability and and readability and and i think the usability i think it’s going to step up just like how it feels to use it like i think we are still we’re using a lot of the ux that we’ve had for like two and a half three years um i think that we’re going to be stepping it up a lot i think we’re going to be improving a lot of apis um i think it’ll be a good year for developing and using web3.

Harsh — awesome awesome so yeah one last question because we spoke about social network and uh innovation so what do you feel about communication or the pre-native communication via wallets. of course we are talking about us and i would love to know your opinion about it.

Dan — Yeah so i mean i think the first principle that i would just advocate and i think that you already do this is is that communication should be opt-in like the last thing we want is anybody can ping my address right um but as long as i’m subscribing to things then i think that it’s on the right direction um obviously we’ve got all sorts of interesting architectural problems like who owes the server do the notifications go down if one server goes down if so that’s a little embarrassing from a web 3 perspective and yet not unrealistic because of the realities of how things get built especially bit by bit communication within the like should we have a messenger built into the wallet at some point you know status does that and that’s that’s really cool you know maybe on the mobile client someday we’ll have something like that um for now you could pretty much do that as a website on the desktop app so that’s not unthinkable but should it be embedded i don’t know i don’t think it’s our top priority right now although uh we do have we’ve had some experiments that i think are get fun where we could we could make a chat where we incorporate like the apis into the chat this is like going off this is not meta masks team uh sanctioned but uh that had a like a weekend hack with kumavs a little while back where we made like a chatbot that incorporated a javascript api within the chat context and i could imagine making a cool like social smart contracting environment where you can like actually maybe code and invoke and interact right there in the chat um i think that’d be really fun someday.

Harsh — Yeah, that’s insane.

Dan — no no no that was that’s a lot that’s uh so so there’s there’s a lot of different things that communication can mean of course right like so PUSH, it’s a good starting point because like any other communication is based on it and uh and it seems like it should be a simple use case although making it properly decentralized is always more uh complicated than you might anticipate yep, yes so congratulations on the launch today.

Harsh — Thanks thanks, you so ,much sam uh awesome so this brings us to the end of phase one of the interview done uh what we don’t tell our guest is that richa basically uh online uh i mean she stalks uh i guess online prepares a customized set of key questions for them and then uh ask uh those questions to you uh so that’s uh the phase two of the interview and on to you richa.

Richa — thanks and these are not as scary questions as harsh as making them sound they’re just funny questions so then i’ll just ask some questions maybe rapid fire take five to ten seconds and we’ll have some fun all right so let’s get started .

your favorite builder?

Dan — i mean i feel like the word builder for me is almost synonymous with austin griffith like he’s with the build i feel like he’s done so much for making usable tools and building a community like taking on apprentices i think it’s just a wonderful thing.

Richa — yep yep and he’s one of our favorite guests as well . so the next question, if fox doesn’t exist in the world what does the metamask logo look like?

Dan — um maybe it’s an octopus uh just because her next choice was the mustache but i don’t know um yeah yeah i’ll go with the octopus for now.

Richa — so you get up and it’s the year 2050, what do you see?

Dan — i get up well do we even see any more or do we just like interpret our kind of neural link sensory inputs from the world um uh hopefully i see a bunch of um well hopefully i see my bedroom and then i step out and hopefully i see a community of friends who are you know have what they need to and are empowered to uh you know build lives that they’re happy with.

Richa — we know you’re multi-talented so what’s your another hidden talent that we don’t know of

Dan — i did i played a lot of violin as a child with like eight years or something so um when i make digital instruments they’re usually fretless like i like between the notes i think it’s a beautiful thing to not be constrained to a single scale.

Richa — one of the most popular questions asked, when dollar meta ?

Dan — when dollar meta ? you mean like when token yeah uh uh definitely not as soon as you’re hoping just just dial back dial back a little bit take take a break build something you care about uh don’t count on us to you know like we’re we’re really focused on enabling people to enable themselves um you know if if we you know at any point do something like that you know we’ll we’ll make sure our community is the first to know but not not too soon

Richa — awesome and that’s a shout out to everybody who’s trying to claim some airdrops so there is no token out there.

Dan — yeah yes we’ll tell you what tell you what if you’re ever claiming an airdrop just know a real airdrop is not going to ask for your secret recovery phrase okay just step one you know you can go get some shady tokens from strangers on twitter just like if they throw errors on etherscan and try to direct you to some other shady website you know don’t give them your secret recovery phrase etc.. etc basically don’t give out your secret recovery face and then you should be okay like you know it’s fine to accept airdrops and see what those are worth but yeah just um don’t also give away everything you own

Richa — there you heard it if you could be a fly on the wall who would you want to listen in on ?

Dan — on these days i honestly i feel like i’m so lucky i feel like i get to listen in on i think i feel like i get to join and and talk to and uh interact with you know some of the the most incredibly brilliant people in the world and and i’m so grateful um honestly at metamask i’ve we’ve been getting enormous uh inspiration and mentorship from the folks at agoric so people like mark miller and dean tribble and uh and chris kowal um you know and kate sills and oh i mean i won’t gonna like list that whole company sorry i will i’m gonna hold back but um uh incredibly grateful i i love talking to mark and them and um they they teach us so much about building secure distributed systems and that’s what we’re really doing and they’ve got like decades of thoughts on the topic and so i’ve been so so happy to meet people that feel like they’re historically deep on a topic that i’ve found myself in.

Richa — amazing uh what is the first thing that comes to your mind when i say the following wrong answers only. ATH ?

Dan — a hundred dollars right

Richa — ______

Dan — yeah we i i sure hope so let’s let’s make it so make it so let’s not assume it.

Richa — huh yes gm uh

Dan — yeah good morning

Richa — Wrong answers only

Dan — Oh wrong answers only, oh sorry uh gold mine.

Richa — amazing your favorite ice cream flavor.

Dan — i don’t eat a lot of ice cream oh i’ve been enjoying a salted caramel mochi though.

Richa — really good cats or dogs?

Dan — cats, all right i got a cat i love him

Richa — there you go your favorite superhero?

Dan — I’m not a huge comic book person so you know my earliest formative superhero was just Superman. I liked the sass of spiderman. I like the industriousness of iron man. I don’t know yeah, yeah.

Richa — that works all the classics your top three projects of ethereum are?

Dan — Account abstraction uh so like let’s let’s bring uh you know contract accountabilities to all accounts sorry to just say ______safe again but i think that extensible contract accounts are great well also you know what shout out to nick mudge with the diamond standard i really think that that’s a cool uh way to compose smart contracts yeah sorry like i’m like not touching like investable things i’m talking like things that are like primitive and facilitate building great things.

Richa — that’s amazing and finally what does ethereum mean to you.

Dan — ethereum means to me uh our first great shot at building a trustworthy shared computing base

Harsh — that’s amazing like uh i love all those answers uh especially uh a hundred dollar i mean

Dan — demonstrably false that was an easy one.

Harsh — awesome thank you so much dan for coming on the show and uh taking your time out i mean uh we loved every bit of the conversation uh and yeah uh to everyone who has tuned in uh till next time guys gold mine.