Everything Everywhere All at Once

Moore's Law, Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, Wright's Law, and Gilder's Law all point to rapidly increasing technology and innovation cycles. In the world of crypto, we add the principles of permissionless innovation, open-source technology, and modularity theory (to name only a few), resulting in innovation cycles that are arguably second to none. These tides, currents and waves come to mind as I reflect on the first quarter of the year.

In a recent conversation with a famous VC and crypto fund, they expressed their amazement at how quickly exuberant valuations had returned and how ebullient the ecosystem was from a mere quarter ago. "We are so back" was an often observed phrase across the ecosystem in Q1. As a perfect testament to this acceleration, memecoins have undergone a "tik-tok'ifcation" this cycle, compressing into lasting only a few days, hours or even minutes. Yet attracting seasoned investors who need and want to participate.

It's not surprising that this abundance of innovation presents remarkable opportunities. Given tokenomics and values and principles that rebuke inflationary assets (in distribution, not in price), being early in crypto can be rewarding. This is why, since the Cambrian explosion started during the DeFi summer, organisations have needed and wanted access. First slowly, then all at once, each cycle draws more adoption from consumers and institutions alike. Hence, organisations don't just need access; they need unrivalled access.

At MetaMask Institutional, our core belief is centred around this concept of unrivalled access. We are convinced that organisations, regardless of their structure or location, will need to engage with the new internet, web3, through various product experiences. This could be at the forefront of web3 innovation, a curated interface, or programmatically.

At MMI, we adhere to stringent product principles that guide us in creating experiences from zero to one and from one to many. Our first principles revolve around providing unrivalled web3 access and empowering institutions to oversee, manage, control, and report on their web3 assets, regardless of their required interface. These principles drive the three value streams we have established: the MMI Extension, which enables secure access to the long tail of permissionless innovation within web3; the Portfolio Dashboard, a curated web3 read-and-write institutional experience; and our SDK and APIs for unrivalled programmatic access. With these products and first principles, we shape our product strategies to address the most critical user needs (tier-1) for our users. Our strategies encompass many areas, from creating delightful user experiences and seamless control to unrivalled reporting on any asset, anywhere.

Reflecting on Q1, perhaps one strategy perfectly summarises our focus to solve the fundamental user need for unrivalled access: "Any asset, anywhere". To stand in accord with the rapid innovation within the ecosystem, Q1 was a prodigious quarter for the MMI team.

Growth

“Much effort, much prosperity.”— Euripedes

In Q2, MMI grew 70.83% quarter-over-quarter with newly signed and activated organisations. This growth was driven by 81.82% in North America and Europe, 88.89% in APAC and MENA and 59.17% in LATAM.

Extension & Integrations

“The value is in what gets used, not in what gets built”. – Kris Gale

The MMI extension provides connectivity to all of web3, most notably the frontier of web3. In Q1 2024, our strategy was focused on delighting our users with improved user experience. Our goal is to give users access to the long tail of permissionless innovation with an experience that offers enterprise-grade security and stability. Our goal has been to build a valuable product for our users as measured by engagement and retention. The MMI extension has an 8-week retention rate of 63.68% and a weekly over-monthly transacting user engagement ratio of 0.616. Mixpanel’s benchmark data shows that the average retention rates of web and mobile applications are eight weeks below 20%. At the same time, Sequoia Capital indicates just how high our engagement metric is.

Portfolio Dashboard

“I want it all and I want it now” — Queen

A product principle within our team is to spend time with our users daily. From these sessions, we have consistently heard a repeating pain point. That no product in the market today shows them everything. Given the fast innovation cycles in new Layer 1 and Layer 2’s across EVM and Non-EVM networks, users are still required to track and report on their positions manually. Accordingly, our Q1 strategy was focused on any asset anywhere, layering in different initiatives and epics to empower users to consolidate all their holdings. Within our tactics, we first shipped account management within the Portfolio Dashboard, focusing on offering a delightful user experience. Firstly, we automatically detect any accounts any user in an organisation has transacted with and then automatically add it to their organisation. Secondly, if we detect a new account in the MMI extension that is not already part of an organisation, we ask the user if they would like to add any of these accounts to their organisation. Lastly, users can now enter any account for their organisation by navigating to the Accounts section in the portfolio dashboard. Any EVM accounts added to an organisation will be shown within the transaction history view. We show the transaction history from the inception of an address. Lastly, any accounts added to an organisation will be snapshot daily, providing detailed validation statements. Our strategy here is to offer seamless control.

Our next tactic was to integrate Solana support, a process that now allows users to add a Solana account with just a few clicks. Solana accounts and tokens are seamlessly integrated into the Assets section of the Portfolio Dashboard and added to Snapshots. Our last tactic focused on implementing support for Centralised Exchange data. With our Mesh integration, we launched with support for Coinbase Prime and will soon add more Prime and Institutional account support. Users can now connect their prime accounts, view their token balances within the Portfolio Dashboard, and get snapshot valuations of all their on-chain and off-chain holdings.

Our ultimate goal is to build a curated, institutional product that our users can’t live without. We measure the value we provide through engagement and retention metrics. Our 8-week retention for the portfolio dashboard since inception is 49.63%, more than double the average for mobile and web applications. This success is a testament to our shared vision and the value we deliver to our users.

DeFi open source adapter

“Thunderbolts and lightning” — Queen

As permissionless innovation has expanded the depth and breadth of DeFi protocols, our users have increasingly needed accurate DeFi data. Over the last two years, we have spent 10,000 hours in the DeFi data trenches, building simulators to simulate closing positions and the value of the underlying tokens, and speaking with the consumers and producers of DeFi data. From this, we have consistently heard the same repeating challenges. Namely, users who need accurate DeFi positions and those with DeFi protocols who need and want users to interact with their protocols. In conjunction with this race for data in a world of permissionless innovation, we also found:

1. DeFi protocols were not being connected with users at scale
2. There is no standard for both read and write DeFi access
3. Few scaled approaches benefit the wider ecosystem

As a result, we set out to build a DeFi adapter standard that is focused on achieving the following goals:

1. Provide a standardised adapter implementation specification for both read and write data. We want to enable any protocol engineer to build an adapter in less than four hours.
2. Provide rich and in-depth DeFi data. We resolve an LP token into the underlying token exposure to value a position. We also offer proper time-weighted profit & loss (P&L) and return data, therefore accounting for inflows and outflows, claimed and unclaimed rewards to arrive at the correct P&L and performance position.
3. Benefit the wider ecosystem. We want to create an open-source standard that benefits consumers of the data, drives users to DeFi protocols and allows anyone to fork and use the repository.

This work ties in with our strategies of any asset anywhere and unrivalled programmatic access, and we delight our users with industry-leading rich and in-depth data. More information can be found here.

Programmatic Access

“These go to eleven” — Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

We believe many institutions have a fundamental need to access web3 programmatically both to read and write along with being able to monitor, manage, control and report on their web3 assets. With our strategy of unrivalled access, we launched our third value stream this quarter announcing our institutional DeFi, valuation and reporting APIs.

Q2 2024

As we look toward the next quarter, we will continue to focus on delighting our users through several high-value features. You can expect to see improved user experiences, a continuation of features that offer seamless control and unrivalled reporting to users. Q2 is also filled with conferences, and we look forward to spending time with our new, existing and potential users.

Director of Product Management

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