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Our focus at MMI is to serve users with meaningful & measurable value and our users' faith in our products is underlined by our eight-week retention rate of more than 65%.
GM.
Crypto has an odd peculiarity—a result of its unparalleled innovation cycles, everything moves at a lightning-fast speed. It means we joke about ageing in dog years. It also means time can oddly warp. A quarter’s passing feels like yesterday, but also a year ago. In reflection on the first quarter of the year, I find the same strange occurrence.
“Well, ain’t this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!” –
In the first quarter of 2023, we saw the closures of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate and Signature Bank—three previously essential service providers for the world of institutional crypto. These closures resulted in profound reverberations for startups, crypto organisations, crypto funds and venture capital firms (VCs). USDC de-pegged and re-pegged in a matter of days, DEXs recorded all-time high volumes, Uniswap beat Coinbase’ trading volume in March and sadly, there were more hacks. There were zk-EVM announcements by Polygon, ZKSync (Matter labs) and ConsenSys. The Ethereum Foundation deployed and announced account abstraction support on Mainnet during ETHDenver. The Shanghai/Cappella upgrade went live, resulting in ETH staking withdrawals. Lastly, we saw a series of notices and announcements from regulators, which all makes one think of the infamous quote: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Are there any weeks when nothing happens in crypto?
Within MetaMask Institutional (MMI), we follow product and design principles. It denotes why and how we are in service to our users. We couple this with a team culture focused on service, value and urgency for our users—the urgency to ship new products and features that provide measurable and meaningful value. To stand on ceremony with the wider crypto industry, we should also (and do) look back every quarter, reflecting on the range of improvements we have made to our products. Can you, our users, better monitor, manage, risk control, distribute and report on your web3 assets? Can you access any asset anywhere? Can you also do so securely and safely? Are you drawing meaningful and consistent value from using MMI? These are the questions we ask, and judge, ourselves by. Reflecting on Q1 2023, I believe MMI is a better product for our users across these categories.
The MMI extension provides unrivalled access to the ‘frontier’ of web3. It is a product with eight-week retention above 65% —a metric we pay close attention to. Over the last quarter, we scaled and launched improved infrastructure to cater to tens of thousands of organisations. It means our APIs are faster, more robust and offer higher uptimes.
“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”
Our portfolio dashboard is a curated, institutional hub for organisations to access, monitor, manage, report and control their web3 assets. Within the last 90 days, we built DeFi adapters and a transaction simulator. In addition, we launched token and DeFi attribution across our user’s most used DeFi protocols, providing a breakdown of claimed and unclaimed rewards, inflows and outflows, and using time-weighted calculations to calculate profit & loss and performance. Our transaction simulator today provides DeFi valuations, but we have plans to serve our users with better security over the next six months.
We also launched account bundling (for organisations to manage their accounts), improved reporting and more comprehensive EVM coverage with our NFT views. Lastly, we implemented authentication and login, allowing our users to set different members and roles for their organisation and automating their onboarding and billing. An in-depth overview can be found here.
Lastly, within our web3 primitive team, we built and launched an Institutional Staking marketplace. We built the marketplace as we believe and foresee large-scale currents coupled with immediate rising waves and tides. Allow me to elaborate on this. Over the long term (currents), we believe web3 creates a new and fairer internet that empowers individuals and organisations with digital authority. Over the last two years (tides), we have seen an explosion of organisations accessing web3 to participate in everything from NFTs to Gaming and DeFi. Underlying these applications is the decentralised network itself. Since the Merge last year, and with the announcement of the Shanghai/Capella upgrade (waves), we have seen similar demand from organisations to validate the Ethereum network. Accordingly, our staking marketplace provides access to best-in-breed staking providers. It offers a seamless staking experience, provides standardised terms and conditions to simplify the user selection process, and offers institutional-grade reporting. This is MMI’s first native web3 primitive, however, over the next six months, we will launch a series of additional primitives focused on providing unrivalled, seamless and secure access to web3 assets.
In terms of growth, and despite the impacts within the institutional crypto world, we continued to onboard new organisations across crypto funds, VCs and others. Our assets under deployment (AUD), a measure of assets deployed on-chain using MMI, increased by 89.17%. At the same time, our projected annual revenue went up by +25.87%. The team attended ETHDenver and Paris Blockchain Week Summit, where we connected in person with our users at two private events.
As we look ahead to the next quarter, we will continue to iterate and improve every aspect of MMI. The MMI team continues to push as hard and fast as possible to be of service and greater value to our users. Accordingly, we have big announcements planned for Q2. Watch this space and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more insights.
@johannbornman
MetaMask Institutional Product Lead