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A New Chapter: Discovering The Best Internet

Having a system for managing safe extensibility is really a new beginning. The APIs we launch with today could each enable a Snap that multiplies the usefulness of MetaMask, but maybe even more importantly is the fact that with this foundation, we can increasingly look at any part of the wallet that we think users deserve more control over, or that developers have more creativity to offer for, and we can open up an API method and let the creativity in to sweep the product in new directions. This isn’t just a feature release, this is the product taking a dramatically more externally collaborative posture. One of my greatest pains helping craft MetaMask over my nearly eight years here has been being constantly aware of the ocean of creativity that was just out of our backlog’s reach because of our regular obligation to the essentials of safety and compatibility. Snaps is a humble admission that we can’t do this all alone. The journey of discovering the best internet will take many creative contributions. On top of that, we couldn’t ship my ideas as fast as I had them, either! Snaps is covertly a selfish feature: You will now be able to extend the most popular wallet with less bureaucracy than a founder of the world’s most popular wallet could last week.

I think it’s important to acknowledge one major limitation of the current Snaps system. Today it cannot be fully permissionlessly extended. The Snaps that can be installed are ones that we approved because we confirmed they were audited, in addition to being confined in all the ways the installation prompt says. This was made both out of an abundance of caution, and because we have ideas for how to add additional safety for a permissionless version that will take longer to implement, but we wanted to get something out the door sooner (it’s already been so long).

Make no mistake, the long game is permissionless computing. One of the inciting events in my web3 journey was having a good app rejected by Apple for arbitrary reasons. Today it seems like computers are either safe walled gardens or totally insecure but permissionless, and I believe we’ve built foundations for carving a space that is neither of those things, and our sights are set on that space in between. Safe, user-custodial computing is on its way, and we invite you to help us define it.

If you’re a developer wanting to experiment with this platform, I have to recommend installing Flask, our developer-centric distribution of MetaMask. With it you can install any Snap (even one we haven’t audited), and start building your own.

Anyways, this is a great moment to celebrate, because we are multiplying the number of features MetaMask has today, but the funny part is that the most exciting stuff is doubtlessly the parts that have yet to be built on it. So I celebrate, I cherish, I am so deeply grateful for a brilliant driven team who made this enormous feat possible. I also look forward to filling out this next chapter together.