MetaMask founders admit ‘putting your money in crypto is gambling’

As the cryptocurrency industry grows at an unprecedented pace, the co-founders of one of the most popular software crypto wallets, MetaMask, have taken the time to convey a couple of warnings about the budding space.

Specifically, MetaMask co-founders Aaron Davis and Dan Finlay expressed their opinions and recounted their origin story in a joint interview with Vice Motherboard’s Maxwell Strachan published on July 14.

During the interview, Davis compared investing in crypto to gambling and warned against directing all of your life savings into the new asset class. As he explained:

“It feels too little too late, but putting your money in cryptocurrencies is gambling. (…) I’m not saying what we have right now is the future of finance and [you should] move your life savings over. A lot of people are advocating that and I think that is extremely dangerous behavior.”

On top of that, Davis also admitted that, when he first started developing the MetaMask system, he couldn’t predict that Ethereum (ETH) would become “so primarily financial” and that he wasn’t entirely surprised by the emergence of complex blockchain Ponzi schemes.

Rampant Ponzi schemes

Finlay agreed with his observations, stressing that there were many issues present, including bad actors, resulting in failures and crashes in the crypto ecosystem. He admits that MetaMask cannot do much to prevent fraudsters from taking advantage of these blind spots:

“We can’t stop people from making Ponzis on blockchains. (…) It’s by definition impossible for us to wrap the whole thing into one unified bow and enforce it in a direction.” 

However, whereas it’s impossible to ban the Ponzi schemes, he believes it is achievable to “deprive them of the precious oxygen of exposure” by making online crypto relationships more “consensual” and making it more difficult “for unreputable things to gain credibility.”

Humble beginnings and sympathetic cause

Meanwhile, Finlay and Davis described MetaMask’s beginnings, which started as a desire “to help people raise funds, send micropayments, and more,” as Finlay explained in an interview for ConsenSys’s blog post published on July 14, as part of marking the crypto wallet’s sixth anniversary. 

In the ConsenSys interview, they both highlighted the shared belief that new trust foundations should be established in a world where “most people neither know how to trust computers, nor each other.” 

Therefore, Finlay highlighted his mission “to leave people feeling like they are able to trust more things again, but for the right reasons,” as well as advised developers to find “a way to serve the rest of humanity. Focus on the problems people have, listen to people, learn how things work, and then see if you can make life a little easier for someone.”

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