Subscribe to mapachurro.eth
Subscribe to mapachurro.eth
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
It’s very easy to fall into that logical fallacy of believing that whatever current state of uncertainty you’re encountering is somehow unique. As if last week, when you said “I don’t know, things are pretty crazy right now,” some objective measure of crazy would be meaningfully different than the one you’re facing right now.
This was my state of crazy on Sunday, February 23rd, 2025, the day that ETH Denver 2025 kicked off:
I’m in Denver, acclimating to the altitude. The sun is shining and the snow is melting, but the group chat is blowing up my phone because Bybit just got hacked for checks notes potentially the largest amount of value of any hack, ever. The attack vector was, on the one hand, very underhanded and criminal, and on the other, leveraged well-known issues with EVM signatures.
The geopolitical tensions that have translated to a certain amount of twitchiness in financial markets, industries of varying types, and, yes, crypto, continue to have their dials slowly turned up. We think there’s good news coming for crypto, in the US at least, but the SEC’s lawsuits against crypto are still on the books. Meanwhile, the Argentine president’s incredible memecoin scam has escaped containment, out into normie-land; I heard a news report on the radio explaining what a “rug pull” is, and my mother brightly told me “I read an article in the New York Times about wallet drainers.”
Over in our corner of the dramaverse, Kevin Owocki woke up and chose violence, publicly trashing ETH Denver for not giving enough airtime to “regens” at the conference this year, which allegedly claims to be the “Year of the Regenerates”. Max Resnick has been given a speaker slot at ETH Denver, straight-up titled “I’m Taking My Talents to Solana”. The Ethereum Foundation’s Pectra upgrade, with changes promising to finally deliver on long-demanded user experience improvements and initially slated to go live a mere three days after the end of the conference, had functionally broken on multiple testnets.
So–a decidedly unsure environment in which to kick off the US’ flagship crypto conference.
What I was doing in Denver was rare for me: I was there to do sales.
I am not a natural-born salesman. When I was a kid, I had a terrible time selling things to support Boy Scouts or a school trip. But when the request came through for people who would be willing to represent MetaMask Card and sign up ETH Denver attendees for it, my hand went up—because it’s a product I can authentically endorse, at a personal level as well as a professional one.
This tweet does a better job than I can at giving a high-level comparison of the current state of the “crypto card market”, but my essential pitch was: “It’s a MasterCard that you connect to a MetaMask account. You do KYC with a bank we’ve partnered with. We don’t see your data, we don’t keep it, we don’t want it. After that, whatever USDC you put in the account you connected, you can spend. Period, that’s it.”
In other words, this is the closest you can get to fully self-custodial banking while still using traditional financial rails.
Several crypto cycles ago, when NFTs hit Christie’s, a fair critique of the state of crypto could include: “These people have all this ‘money’ on blockchains, but there’s nothing they can do with it, really, so of course they’ll spend $30k on a picture of a rock.” A bit judgy, perhaps, but not untrue; taking your value out of crypto into fiat currencies has been questionable at the level of tax, regulation, ethos, and, frankly, pragmatics and practicality.
MetaMask Card changes that, in a big way. The bank can’t tell you where to move your USDC; the keys to your account remain with you. If it’s your money, you can spend it, in the meatspace, on lunch for you, for your cat, on shelves and lamps, taxis, on all debts public and private.
Kind of sells itself, to be honest.
We all hear this metaphor in the tech sector, and I realized early on in the week that I was going to get to experience it, live. The logistics of signing people up for this card, on their phones, at events, in Denver, implicated the entire telecommunications→web application stack, from IP addresses to WiFi to SIM cards, to which version of Android you’re using and whether or not you use biometrics, to wallet SDKs and deeplinking support. Onboarding users through a KYC process in public could be a sensitive thing, especially with crypto users.
Oh, and by the way, we were planning on going live with a first-ever full rebrand of MetaMask on Thursday, including the MetaMask Support site that my team maintains. So... make sure your seat belt is fastened low and tight across your lap.
By Tuesday evening, I had already spoken to enough attendees at the BUIDL Hub hackathon, and at WalletCon, to notice that the general ETH Denver public was fairly well aware of “the MetaMask event”. Mind you, my calendar had some 10-12 events on it, most of which I was scheduled to work; in my mind, those were all “MetaMask events”—but they clearly meant Builder Nights, the event at which MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay was slated to speak, and present the first-ever MetaMask roadmap announcement.
This made it easy when people asked me pointed questions about support for Bitcoin, or Solana, or Account Abstraction / ERC-4337, or 7702 (the list goes on, you get the point): I could, in good faith, tell them to check out Dan Finlay’s talk at Builder Nights. And as an employee of Consensys, it was gratifying to see that our efforts in holding this event routinely were paying off; it’s a Known Important Event at crypto conferences.
And sometime Thursday, a coworker told me the number of people that had registered for the event, and it was eye-popping. Unfortunately, I have a terrible memory for numbers, but it was something like “the venue has a capacity of 300, and we’re quadruple booked.” I guess word got around.
In the meantime, external events kept happening:
In case you missed it, MetaMask Card runs on the Linea network, and you know, in crypto, you can just do things–so naturally, the memecoin teams and communities of Linea launched a permissionless memecoin rewards system for MetaMask Card. On Wednesday.
This is what building in the open looks like: You’re at a conference, promoting your product, and some other team launches a feature for it that is a huge selling point, and you’re hearing about it in almost-real time:
Oh–and the SEC dropped its case against Consensys, as well as Coinbase. On Thursday. nbd.
So yeah, now it’s Thursday. All the many, many MetaMask websites are deploying the new brand. We’ve rebuilt the plane in midair, and Dan gives a barnburner of a talk, so we could finally hand out dope, huge new fox stickers, and the feeling my team and I got as we worked events representing MetaMask was that we landed that rebuilt plane, too.
I wasn’t at Builder Nights (sorry Dan, the Pudgy Penguins x MetaMask party went hard), but the ferocity with which people tried to steal my MetaMask sweatshirt (not joking), the authentic congratulations they offered us on the new brand and the SEC victory, and the obvious excitement they had for MetaMask Card translated to a unified impression that we as a company and a product had effectively communicated what we’re about, what we’ve been building, and what it will do for people.
The high-level echo chamber discourse following ETH Denver appears to echo a feeling I did experience at times walking around the venue: “Who are these people and these projects? I don’t recognize this ethos.”
Within forty-five seconds of walking in, I came around a corner and was confronted with the first of several Boston Dynamics robot dogs, branded with the colors and logos of whatever company had brought it. My first instinct, which I managed to cut off, was to absolutely yeet it with a kick to center mass. And that gave me pause.
The crypto - decentralized web - web3 technology space is not devoid of context. It was born of a movement of rejection of the legacy systems of control. So now it’s 2025, and people are shilling their products using literal police state robot lapdogs? I’m a law-abiding citizen as much as I can be, but read the room?
Maybe Owocki had a point. I’ve been following regenerative finance, and more broadly, regenerative use cases, of crypto technology closely for more than three years, and those projects weren’t super visible on the conference floor.
Regen use cases are the ones that actually matter. If we’re not using this technology for localized, community-and user-owned purposes that materially improve the lives of the people using them, then, well… Technology is a force multiplier, and if crypto tech is more powerful than legacy web tech, then we’ve just rebuilt the stack of the legacy systems of control, stronger, and handed it over to them.
That said, there’s reason for optimism that we already have tools that are credibly decentralized and maintainable, and can help us get out of the clutches of the personal data marketing value extraction machine.
I was quite pleased to see a massive Arweave presence on the floor. Two years ago, I had a forty-five minute conversation with a passionate, but somewhat exhausted, community representative from Arweave, which at the time was reworking its consensus mechanism and tokenomics. The past two years have been good for them, and the stuff they already have live is truly exciting.
If you’re not familiar with it, Arweave is a decentralized storage blockchain. IPFS, which you might have heard of, answers the question “How do we rebuild the structure of the Internet to make it durable, resilient to very high latency or broken connections, responsive to local demands, but at the same time, flexible and open to change?” The answer ws “Implement a new standard that can replace HTTPS (the IPFS protocol itself), and an entire goddamn decentralized storage network (Filecoin).”
Arweave, on the other hand, answers the question, “Hey. You crypto types, and hey, normies too — you just want a blockchain that immutably stores data, cheaply, forever, that you can access easily, right? OK, that’s us.”
A key difference between them is that while data, in theory, could be stored forever on IPFS, that only happens if someone keeps it around (“pins” it); Arweave’s value prop is “pay once, store forever.”
Those are subtle, important differences that at first glance appear to be in competition, but are in fact complementary. You need both of those options if we want to replace the current ✨iNtErNet ✨ with something better.
What Arweave has launched, and I’ve seen it in the wild, are permadapps; if you can pay once, store forever, and access it wherever, that means you can pay once, store an app forever, and access it wherever. If you’re interested, the LLM-forward team of bigbrains over at cookbook.dev made a very nice set of docs for permadapps.
Now, I hear you—I’m pitching you an improved internet, but I’m showing you a URL like:
And that’s fair. The good news is that we’ve got a lot of cool tools that are already working to fix this.
ENS had a very popular booth at ETH Denver, and are busy shipping lots of stuff. It’s not just for Ethereum Mainnet anymore; after all, we’ve had ENS names on Linea for a while now. Cheap, customizable… But what do you do with it?
That takes us back to Protocol Labs (parent company of IPFS); fleek is a web app deployment pipeline for IPFS / Filecoin. They work closely with eth.limo, itself an ENS project: by assigning an IPFS hash to a given ENS name, you can have a decent, human-readable URL that takes you to a website deployed to Filecoin and accessible via the IPFS protocol.
(Oh, and if you want an edgier flavor, I met a guy who works with eth.sucks while we were trying to escape the booze-fueled Stellar casino night at the aquarium. As one does.)
If that’s a lot of technobabble, I get it; you can see what I mean, and maybe look up some of the words I’m using, at wordsofweb3.eth.limo:
Initialism; InterPlanetary File System
Here’s where it gets good: ENS’ success has not gone unnoticed. This is a design pattern that is now being replicated across projects and even chains. Arweave has ARNS, so slap one of those on your permadapp.
Aleo, too, has a name service, aleonames. And it’s projects like Arweave, and Aleo, that give me hope that we might still be able to move faster than the iron fist:
Aleo is an L1 that has zero-knowledge functionality baked in at very granular levels. Imagine your blockchain has good enough encryption that you could, say, create a profile for yourself that includes your social security number, or other demographic information that really shouldn’t be public. Sound scary?
Well, you could have a dapp running on that blockchain that is able to, for example, verify that you are a resident of XYZ location, or have a valid SSN, and return a proof that it’s true, without revealing any of the information it used to get it. ZK KYC.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could build that on Aleo, and then have inter-chain or bridging connectivity for EVM dapps to get that information? Oh, we can, because they built that, too.
As the week progressed, a passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved kept coming to mind unbidden:
“There was no way either of us could have known, at the time, that it would be the last normal conversation we would have. From that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We both went completely to pieces.”
I stayed sober, thankfully, but the current US President began posting about crypto faster than his aides could advise him about the potential impact of his wording. Markets did stonks, and not-stonks. ETH Denver ragers raged.
It’s true, tho
And the Pudgy Penguins x MetaMask collab bender that we’d been on for the better part of the week got turned up a notch:
Are things crazy right now? Sure. Are they any crazier than a week ago? Ask yourself honestly. The world’s a weird place.
And if it feels weird, well, just remember another Hunter S. Thompson banger: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
It’s very easy to fall into that logical fallacy of believing that whatever current state of uncertainty you’re encountering is somehow unique. As if last week, when you said “I don’t know, things are pretty crazy right now,” some objective measure of crazy would be meaningfully different than the one you’re facing right now.
This was my state of crazy on Sunday, February 23rd, 2025, the day that ETH Denver 2025 kicked off:
I’m in Denver, acclimating to the altitude. The sun is shining and the snow is melting, but the group chat is blowing up my phone because Bybit just got hacked for checks notes potentially the largest amount of value of any hack, ever. The attack vector was, on the one hand, very underhanded and criminal, and on the other, leveraged well-known issues with EVM signatures.
The geopolitical tensions that have translated to a certain amount of twitchiness in financial markets, industries of varying types, and, yes, crypto, continue to have their dials slowly turned up. We think there’s good news coming for crypto, in the US at least, but the SEC’s lawsuits against crypto are still on the books. Meanwhile, the Argentine president’s incredible memecoin scam has escaped containment, out into normie-land; I heard a news report on the radio explaining what a “rug pull” is, and my mother brightly told me “I read an article in the New York Times about wallet drainers.”
Over in our corner of the dramaverse, Kevin Owocki woke up and chose violence, publicly trashing ETH Denver for not giving enough airtime to “regens” at the conference this year, which allegedly claims to be the “Year of the Regenerates”. Max Resnick has been given a speaker slot at ETH Denver, straight-up titled “I’m Taking My Talents to Solana”. The Ethereum Foundation’s Pectra upgrade, with changes promising to finally deliver on long-demanded user experience improvements and initially slated to go live a mere three days after the end of the conference, had functionally broken on multiple testnets.
So–a decidedly unsure environment in which to kick off the US’ flagship crypto conference.
What I was doing in Denver was rare for me: I was there to do sales.
I am not a natural-born salesman. When I was a kid, I had a terrible time selling things to support Boy Scouts or a school trip. But when the request came through for people who would be willing to represent MetaMask Card and sign up ETH Denver attendees for it, my hand went up—because it’s a product I can authentically endorse, at a personal level as well as a professional one.
This tweet does a better job than I can at giving a high-level comparison of the current state of the “crypto card market”, but my essential pitch was: “It’s a MasterCard that you connect to a MetaMask account. You do KYC with a bank we’ve partnered with. We don’t see your data, we don’t keep it, we don’t want it. After that, whatever USDC you put in the account you connected, you can spend. Period, that’s it.”
In other words, this is the closest you can get to fully self-custodial banking while still using traditional financial rails.
Several crypto cycles ago, when NFTs hit Christie’s, a fair critique of the state of crypto could include: “These people have all this ‘money’ on blockchains, but there’s nothing they can do with it, really, so of course they’ll spend $30k on a picture of a rock.” A bit judgy, perhaps, but not untrue; taking your value out of crypto into fiat currencies has been questionable at the level of tax, regulation, ethos, and, frankly, pragmatics and practicality.
MetaMask Card changes that, in a big way. The bank can’t tell you where to move your USDC; the keys to your account remain with you. If it’s your money, you can spend it, in the meatspace, on lunch for you, for your cat, on shelves and lamps, taxis, on all debts public and private.
Kind of sells itself, to be honest.
We all hear this metaphor in the tech sector, and I realized early on in the week that I was going to get to experience it, live. The logistics of signing people up for this card, on their phones, at events, in Denver, implicated the entire telecommunications→web application stack, from IP addresses to WiFi to SIM cards, to which version of Android you’re using and whether or not you use biometrics, to wallet SDKs and deeplinking support. Onboarding users through a KYC process in public could be a sensitive thing, especially with crypto users.
Oh, and by the way, we were planning on going live with a first-ever full rebrand of MetaMask on Thursday, including the MetaMask Support site that my team maintains. So... make sure your seat belt is fastened low and tight across your lap.
By Tuesday evening, I had already spoken to enough attendees at the BUIDL Hub hackathon, and at WalletCon, to notice that the general ETH Denver public was fairly well aware of “the MetaMask event”. Mind you, my calendar had some 10-12 events on it, most of which I was scheduled to work; in my mind, those were all “MetaMask events”—but they clearly meant Builder Nights, the event at which MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay was slated to speak, and present the first-ever MetaMask roadmap announcement.
This made it easy when people asked me pointed questions about support for Bitcoin, or Solana, or Account Abstraction / ERC-4337, or 7702 (the list goes on, you get the point): I could, in good faith, tell them to check out Dan Finlay’s talk at Builder Nights. And as an employee of Consensys, it was gratifying to see that our efforts in holding this event routinely were paying off; it’s a Known Important Event at crypto conferences.
And sometime Thursday, a coworker told me the number of people that had registered for the event, and it was eye-popping. Unfortunately, I have a terrible memory for numbers, but it was something like “the venue has a capacity of 300, and we’re quadruple booked.” I guess word got around.
In the meantime, external events kept happening:
In case you missed it, MetaMask Card runs on the Linea network, and you know, in crypto, you can just do things–so naturally, the memecoin teams and communities of Linea launched a permissionless memecoin rewards system for MetaMask Card. On Wednesday.
This is what building in the open looks like: You’re at a conference, promoting your product, and some other team launches a feature for it that is a huge selling point, and you’re hearing about it in almost-real time:
Oh–and the SEC dropped its case against Consensys, as well as Coinbase. On Thursday. nbd.
So yeah, now it’s Thursday. All the many, many MetaMask websites are deploying the new brand. We’ve rebuilt the plane in midair, and Dan gives a barnburner of a talk, so we could finally hand out dope, huge new fox stickers, and the feeling my team and I got as we worked events representing MetaMask was that we landed that rebuilt plane, too.
I wasn’t at Builder Nights (sorry Dan, the Pudgy Penguins x MetaMask party went hard), but the ferocity with which people tried to steal my MetaMask sweatshirt (not joking), the authentic congratulations they offered us on the new brand and the SEC victory, and the obvious excitement they had for MetaMask Card translated to a unified impression that we as a company and a product had effectively communicated what we’re about, what we’ve been building, and what it will do for people.
The high-level echo chamber discourse following ETH Denver appears to echo a feeling I did experience at times walking around the venue: “Who are these people and these projects? I don’t recognize this ethos.”
Within forty-five seconds of walking in, I came around a corner and was confronted with the first of several Boston Dynamics robot dogs, branded with the colors and logos of whatever company had brought it. My first instinct, which I managed to cut off, was to absolutely yeet it with a kick to center mass. And that gave me pause.
The crypto - decentralized web - web3 technology space is not devoid of context. It was born of a movement of rejection of the legacy systems of control. So now it’s 2025, and people are shilling their products using literal police state robot lapdogs? I’m a law-abiding citizen as much as I can be, but read the room?
Maybe Owocki had a point. I’ve been following regenerative finance, and more broadly, regenerative use cases, of crypto technology closely for more than three years, and those projects weren’t super visible on the conference floor.
Regen use cases are the ones that actually matter. If we’re not using this technology for localized, community-and user-owned purposes that materially improve the lives of the people using them, then, well… Technology is a force multiplier, and if crypto tech is more powerful than legacy web tech, then we’ve just rebuilt the stack of the legacy systems of control, stronger, and handed it over to them.
That said, there’s reason for optimism that we already have tools that are credibly decentralized and maintainable, and can help us get out of the clutches of the personal data marketing value extraction machine.
I was quite pleased to see a massive Arweave presence on the floor. Two years ago, I had a forty-five minute conversation with a passionate, but somewhat exhausted, community representative from Arweave, which at the time was reworking its consensus mechanism and tokenomics. The past two years have been good for them, and the stuff they already have live is truly exciting.
If you’re not familiar with it, Arweave is a decentralized storage blockchain. IPFS, which you might have heard of, answers the question “How do we rebuild the structure of the Internet to make it durable, resilient to very high latency or broken connections, responsive to local demands, but at the same time, flexible and open to change?” The answer ws “Implement a new standard that can replace HTTPS (the IPFS protocol itself), and an entire goddamn decentralized storage network (Filecoin).”
Arweave, on the other hand, answers the question, “Hey. You crypto types, and hey, normies too — you just want a blockchain that immutably stores data, cheaply, forever, that you can access easily, right? OK, that’s us.”
A key difference between them is that while data, in theory, could be stored forever on IPFS, that only happens if someone keeps it around (“pins” it); Arweave’s value prop is “pay once, store forever.”
Those are subtle, important differences that at first glance appear to be in competition, but are in fact complementary. You need both of those options if we want to replace the current ✨iNtErNet ✨ with something better.
What Arweave has launched, and I’ve seen it in the wild, are permadapps; if you can pay once, store forever, and access it wherever, that means you can pay once, store an app forever, and access it wherever. If you’re interested, the LLM-forward team of bigbrains over at cookbook.dev made a very nice set of docs for permadapps.
Now, I hear you—I’m pitching you an improved internet, but I’m showing you a URL like:
And that’s fair. The good news is that we’ve got a lot of cool tools that are already working to fix this.
ENS had a very popular booth at ETH Denver, and are busy shipping lots of stuff. It’s not just for Ethereum Mainnet anymore; after all, we’ve had ENS names on Linea for a while now. Cheap, customizable… But what do you do with it?
That takes us back to Protocol Labs (parent company of IPFS); fleek is a web app deployment pipeline for IPFS / Filecoin. They work closely with eth.limo, itself an ENS project: by assigning an IPFS hash to a given ENS name, you can have a decent, human-readable URL that takes you to a website deployed to Filecoin and accessible via the IPFS protocol.
(Oh, and if you want an edgier flavor, I met a guy who works with eth.sucks while we were trying to escape the booze-fueled Stellar casino night at the aquarium. As one does.)
If that’s a lot of technobabble, I get it; you can see what I mean, and maybe look up some of the words I’m using, at wordsofweb3.eth.limo:
Initialism; InterPlanetary File System
Here’s where it gets good: ENS’ success has not gone unnoticed. This is a design pattern that is now being replicated across projects and even chains. Arweave has ARNS, so slap one of those on your permadapp.
Aleo, too, has a name service, aleonames. And it’s projects like Arweave, and Aleo, that give me hope that we might still be able to move faster than the iron fist:
Aleo is an L1 that has zero-knowledge functionality baked in at very granular levels. Imagine your blockchain has good enough encryption that you could, say, create a profile for yourself that includes your social security number, or other demographic information that really shouldn’t be public. Sound scary?
Well, you could have a dapp running on that blockchain that is able to, for example, verify that you are a resident of XYZ location, or have a valid SSN, and return a proof that it’s true, without revealing any of the information it used to get it. ZK KYC.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could build that on Aleo, and then have inter-chain or bridging connectivity for EVM dapps to get that information? Oh, we can, because they built that, too.
As the week progressed, a passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved kept coming to mind unbidden:
“There was no way either of us could have known, at the time, that it would be the last normal conversation we would have. From that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We both went completely to pieces.”
I stayed sober, thankfully, but the current US President began posting about crypto faster than his aides could advise him about the potential impact of his wording. Markets did stonks, and not-stonks. ETH Denver ragers raged.
It’s true, tho
And the Pudgy Penguins x MetaMask collab bender that we’d been on for the better part of the week got turned up a notch:
Are things crazy right now? Sure. Are they any crazier than a week ago? Ask yourself honestly. The world’s a weird place.
And if it feels weird, well, just remember another Hunter S. Thompson banger: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
No activity yet