Hey there 👋 ,

I’ve been using Metamask for a long time but didn’t know much about the company behind the ‘Mask.

It was on my mind to explore my curiosity but, as fate would have it, the founding company, ConsenSys, raised its latest funding round (a cool $450m) while DOUBLING its valuation since their last round.

Let’s explore why ConsenSys are a seriously impressive company and some of the core infrastructure they’ve been building.

The Blockchain Mothership

It’s no secret that I’m into companies that provide the underlying infrastructure that allow other teams to build applications in an easier, faster or cheaper way (ideally, all three).

ConsenSys fits this bill to a tee - they are one of the OG’s in the Blockchain game, having been founded in 2014 by Joseph Lubin. He was also one of the original founders behind Ethereum.

Consensys have built a suite of blockchain products to make it easy for anyone to build decentralized applications.

Not only do they build applications geared towards your everyday consumer (like crypto wallet, Metamask), but they’ve been moving vertically up the Blockchain/Web3 stack, serving larger enterprises while making it easier for them to comply with regulation (through a streamlined smart contract auditing application like Diligence).

What’s ConsenSys Solving?

ConsenSys was originally founded by Joseph Lubin, with the 2008 financial crisis and its consequences looming on his mind.

He was convinced there was a total collapse imminent, due to our ever-degrading financial system and greed-centric culture (sub-prime mortgages, cheap money floating around making it easy for anyone to access credit etc).

He then moved around from Wall Street to a music production gig in Jamaica, while investing in Bitcoin as a hedge against government manipulation.

In 2013, he met Vitalik Buterin and after reading Vitalik’s whitepaper for Ethereum (a summary of the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepaper can be found in the first Living In Beta edition), he became part of the Ethereum “fellowship” and original founding team.

While Lubin was more commercially-minded than Buterin, he was a core part of the team due to his knowledge of finance, politics and decades of experience (he was in his mid-40’s while the rest of the founding team were in their twenties).

ConsenSys became the for-profit venture offering the infrastructure to make the products and services around Ethereum work.

While it’s not been an easy ride (letting go of 13% of the workforce in 2018 or seeing the price of ETH plummet by 93% after the dizzying heights of 2017’s crypto bubble), ConsenSys have built some fundamental projects with impressive numbers:

• 30m+ Metamask monthly active users (a 42% increase in 4 months)

• 4.8m+ Truffle developer downloads

• 430k Developers using Infura (the leading Ethereum dev platform)

• $25b+ Secured in Smart Contract audits

Summary: ConsenSys was developed to build the infrastructure for society to shift to a permissionless and decentralized system like the Blockchain, primarily by focusing on building tools to make it easier to develop on the Ethereum blockchain, and profiting from providing better tooling.

The Product Suite:

Metamask:

The gateway to interacting with decentralized applications, Metamask has turned into the de-facto choice for users looking to buy NFTs or transact with each other on Ethereum.

Key features:

• Buy, store, send and swap tokens

• Its available as a browser extension and a mobile app (making it easy for anyone to get started)

• Secure login

• Tools to manage multiple wallets / tokens

Metamask is the simplest way to connect to Blockchain-based applications and take charge of things you own without a 3rd party intermediary managing these for you.

Infura:

Infura offers a range of APIs and tools to developers to build, scale and deploy their applications by using a node-as-a-service approach (I think of them as the AWS for decentralized applications). Right now, they just build tools that are compatible with Ethereum, but they’ve got plans in the pipeline to support cross-chain compatibility (e.g. Polygon and the Binance Smart Chain).

Truffle:

Truffle offers a native developer environment, testing framework and more, aiming to make it even easier for developers to build and deploy applications (by plugging into one of the services we’ve described above).

The Truffle suite also includes Ganache and Drizzle, which are a combination of test environments/data and front-end libraries to snap different building blocks together and benefit from reusable code.

Quorum:

Quorum’s had an interesting founding journey, having been developed open-sourced by JP Morgan and then bought by ConsenSys (they thought it’d be easier to build a private system that would only be open to select clients, similar to the reasons we gave advocating for private blockchains in last week’s newsletter).

Essentially, it’s a open-source protocol that businesses can use to develop Ethereum-based applications. Enterprise developers can enjoy all the benefits provided by a Blockchain (e.g. smart contract privacy and transaction speed) while working in contained and permissioned environments.

This makes it easier for enterprises to experiment building their own Blockchain, without the risk that every client transaction is available for the world to see.

ConsenSys has spent the past eight years developing the core infrastructure many teams - from web3 solo engineers to large enterprise teams - are using today to develop applications on the Blockchain.

Lubin’s vision has steadfastness in the face of uncertainty a few years ago has given them a headstart compared to others just waking up to this opportunity.

Conclusion:

While 90% of the projects in the top 50 crypto projects by market cap five years ago are either no longer there or no longer around, Ethereum has strengthened its grip on the cultural and economic zeitgeist.

ConsenSys have been at the forefront of Ethereum’s rise, and I’d back them to continue growing, even when, inevitably, more players enter the space (whether that be from new Layer 1 blockchains or from native web3 developer platforms setup to directly compete with one of its products).

I expect them to:

• Build low-code solutions for enterprise teams with varying levels of technical capabilities (e.g. like the low-code/no-code revolution taking place now)

• Invest in the development of DAO infrastructure and in DAO’s themselves (its own, Mesh DAO, as well as others in the space)

• Develop private use cases for more regulatory-sensitive institutions (if they haven’t already)

Either way, this is probably the company I’ve been most impressed by so far, but its not just the technology: it’s also the ability to weather the storm, persist in adversity while continuing to build products that make a difference to building a better global system of coordination, finance, and society.

Additional Reading:

• How Joseph Lubin became Wall Street’s crypto whisperer - FT

• ConsenSys plans to spin out most of its startups - The Verge

🗞 Resources of the week:

TrueAccord: Unsexiness-as-a-Moat

Not Boring is a top 3 newsletter for me - while it’s usually blessed with a web3 article or reference, I loved this article on TrueAccord that went deep into the world of debt-collection and building a huge moat in a market that needed disruption.

The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

A 101 guide to Crypto with a ton of resources to match - I’ll be adding this to my Crypto masterclass deck 🤓

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. Got feedback? Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

I’ll be off to Portugal this week, so expect some vibrant photos in next week’s edition :) 🇵🇹

Fahim