On July 31, 2015, Kumavis opened a new repository called metamask-extension and pushed 598 lines of code. The commit message, in its entirety: "init commit."
Ethereum's genesis block had been mined the day before.
Before there was an ecosystem, before there was an industry, before there was anything to compete over, someone was already building the thing that would let ordinary people use it. MetaMask is, almost to the day, as old as Ethereum itself. A year of building later, on July 14, 2016, the first version shipped to the world. That makes today our tenth birthday.
I joined this team six years ago, which makes me a bit of a newcomer by MetaMask standards and an ancient elder by crypto standards. I've spent those six years continuing what Kumavis and Dan Finlay started, and watching our ecosystem and product mature into something ready to onboard the mainstream and bridge the entire financial system.
What the first commit was really about
In 2015, nobody was asking for a browser wallet. There was no category to compete in. What Kumavis and Dan saw was that this new network would only matter if regular people could reach it: not by running a node, not by compiling anything, but from the browser they already had open. So they built the doorway, and then spent years solving problems nobody had ever solved before, because nobody had ever needed to.
That decision defined a category. Every wallet that came after walked through a portal MetaMask constructed. And it quietly established the idea we've been building on ever since: you can hold and use your money directly, without asking anyone's permission.
For years, we and everyone else called that self-custody, and we talked about it like it was the point. It was never the point. It's the means. What it actually gives you is much simpler and much bigger. It means software can serve anyone, anywhere. A bank has to build country by country, license by license. Software that lets you hold your own assets is global by default. Where you're born shouldn't decide what you can do with the money you earn. That's the idea buried in those 598 lines, whether or not anyone would have phrased it that way in 2015.
The decade in between
The ten years since have been anything but a straight line. MetaMask was the doorway to the ICO era, to DeFi Summer, to NFTs, through two brutal winters and back. It started as a transaction signer, became the default wallet of an entire ecosystem, and grew into a platform with more than 100 million downloads across nearly every country on Earth, with trillions of dollars in cumulative volume moved.
I'm proudest of a less flashy number: ten. Very few companies survive ten years. Almost none do it in Web3, and fewer still as a wallet, where a single catastrophic mistake ends you. Every feature we've ever shipped has been replicated by someone within months. That's the nature of software, and it's accelerating with AI. What can't be replicated is a decade of keeping people's funds safe at scale. That was our first job in 2016, it's our first job today, and it's the moat everything else stands on. Trust takes years to build and seconds to lose. We've spent ten years building it.
And to everyone who's been with us for any part of it: the OGs who remember the old fox, the people who sent their first transaction through MetaMask, the ones who left during the rough patches and came back, and honestly even the ones who left and haven't come back yet. This anniversary is yours as much as ours. We built this together.
The next ten years
People ask me what the next decade looks like. I don't have a crystal ball. If I get the next 24 months right, I'll consider myself a genius. But I don't need a crystal ball to see the direction, because it's already happening.
For most of crypto's first decade, the technology ran ahead of reality. What changed is the anchor: real value is coming onchain at scale. Stablecoins have more than doubled in three years and now exceed $300 billion in circulation. Real-world assets, from stocks to currencies to credit, are being tokenized. Institutions that once dismissed these rails now settle on them. The infrastructure got play-tested for ten years, and now it's carrying real money.
That's what we mean by Open Money. The internet did this to information: it took something gated by geography and gatekeepers and made it open, instant, and global. The same shift is now happening to money. Money you hold directly. Money that moves anywhere in seconds, for cents. Money that earns while it sits. Money that stays yours the whole way through.
So MetaMask's next chapter is to become the place where your whole financial life runs: getting paid, saving, spending, investing, sending, all stitched together in one place. Get your salary into MetaMask and it starts earning yield the moment it lands. Buy a stock. Pay for groceries with the card. Send dollars to your family for a few cents. And underneath, something no bank and no fintech can offer: because it's built on open rails, you get access to everything anyone in the world builds, not just what one company's product team ships. A neobank offers you what its team can build. We offer you what all the world's teams build.
Here's the measure of success I keep coming back to: it won't be how many people use blockchain. It will be how many people benefit from it without ever having to think about the technology underneath. Crypto wins when we stop talking about crypto. The first decade made the technology work. The next one makes it disappear into ubiquity.
Ten years ago, one developer pushed 598 lines of code the day after Ethereum came alive, on the bet that people should be able to hold and use their money directly. A hundred million downloads later, the bet is the same. We're just done proving the technology works.
Now we make it work for everyone.
Thanks for ten years. See what your onchain decade looks like at ten.metamask.io.
