Q3.2022 Review from MetaMask Institutional

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.” – Buddha

Hello Friends, Funds, and DAOs,

Over the past two quarters, a consistent theme in these updates has been the volatile macroeconomic, geopolitical and crypto environment. And while Q3 continued the trend, Crypto’s volatility appears to have been matched and outdone by many G8 bond markets and currencies. “May you live in interesting times”, the apocryphal saying goes. Interesting times indeed. While the traditional world repeats its old boom and bust, inflation and deflation cycles, we within Crypto aim to build a new and better system. Arguably, one of the most significant steps to bring this new system to fruition occurred in Q3, as Ethereum moved from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. The upgrade was one of the many bright lights in Web3, another reason to be profoundly confident about the future of our ecosystem.

Bear markets are essential periods to build, and MetaMask Institutional’s (MMI) goal has been to stand on ceremony. Hence, our focus for the quarter was to lay the necessary foundations that allow us to be and continue to be a bright light within Web3. For those reading this circular for the first time, it is MMI’s mission to bridge every organization on earth into Web3. We believe Web3 is eating the world; therefore, we provide and will continue to provide unrivaled access to it. Regardless of the interface, API or key management solution an institution needs. Hence, we think deeply about the infrastructure, tools, features and products required to achieve this. Our quarter, in summary, is a reflection of these values.

Acquisition, Engagement and Retention

In Q3, we announced our next set of custodian partners, bringing our total custodian partners to 11 globally. We now offer the most expansive suite of custodial integrations on the market, ensuring unrivaled access to custody and different key management solutions in different jurisdictions. Thus, regardless of the allocation strategy, crypto asset, or network an organization has or needs access to, we can cater to an organization’s needs. In Q3, we grew our onboarded organizations by 26%, the assets deployed using MMI by 85% and our annual recurring revenue by 400%.

Extension and Custodian Integrations

The MMI extension is the frontier experience that provides unrivaled access to all of Web3. And despite the bear market, we continue to see incredibly healthy engagement and more than double industry standard retention metrics. We have been deeply fortunate to see double-digit week-on-week assets deployed growth throughout this year. Hence, we took the time within the last 90 days to lay more extensive infrastructure to cater to the continued wave of users.

We’ve started to document milestones within MMI’s product development on our change log. Take a look.

Explore Change Log

Portfolio Dashboard

Throughout the quarter, we shipped a range of updates and essential features. We rolled out improved versions of our reporting capabilities, portfolio snapshots, and NFT views. Within an organization’s NFT holding, we now provide a variety of historical and real-time valuation data points for an NFT. As I have written in past updates, we follow strict product and design principles within MMI and focus on identifying Tier-1 user needs. Hence, prioritizing building painkillers over vitamins. In product vocabulary, the latter are small features that can and should delight a user. In contrast, the former solves the most critical and pressing needs. We also do a lot of work to strategically layer our features to ensure they build on top of one another and open up adjacent capabilities. Hence, our vitamin features often lead to painkillers. Throughout the quarter, we implemented a few vitamins throughout the portfolio dashboard. From improved visual layouts and charts to allowing filtering for dust tokens, currency settings, and a general settings sections. These vitamins are laying the foundation for two crucial initiatives (and painkillers) that we aim to ship in Q4 and Q1. In Q3, we saw our portfolio dashboard engagement metrics increase by 160% and 8-week retention metrics by 51%.

We believe the standard for an organization dashboard is incredibly high, and there are so many essential updates we still want to release to meet these standards. However, we are excited about the significant features rolling out in the quarters ahead. Our portfolio dashboard offers a curated institutional experience—the dashboard connects all custodians, accounts, networks, and assets in one place—seamlessly working with the MMI wallet. Hence, we are doing a lot of work to define what we think the institutional user experience should be—both in viewing portfolios and allocating to different digital assets.

Programmatic Access

As more diverse organizations access Web3, API access (over UI) is often a fundamental demand. As we work towards being the unrivaled bridge into Web3, we have been doing a lot of work to ensure that regardless of the execution method of an organization, we can cater to their needs. Within Q3, we open-sourced a Python version of MMI’s SDK. The MMI SDK is effectively the connector to which all our custodian partners integrate. Clients of MMI and our custodian partners can now quickly build programmatic python scripts and connect to our SDK. Allowing for programmatic transaction creations. This capability will enable organizations to execute programmatically across multiple different custodians. We have many plans for this feature and will build out this library to make crafting different execution strategies as simple as possible. With Programmatic Access, we extend MMI’s access to Web3 through an additional interface.

Conclusion

The quarter saw many vital milestones for MMI. From our custodian announcement, integrations, and continued growth to new and improved features—We have laid essential foundations to deliver, what we believe, will be game-changing features in the quarters ahead. We live for our users and are building a product they not only love, but also can’t live without. For those on this circular that are users of MMI, we no doubt have spoken with you, and we look forward to speaking with you again. To all, we can’t wait to show you what MMI has in-store over the quarters ahead.

Sincerely,

__Johann Bornman

Global Product Lead, MetaMask Institutional