Back in 2017, I spent way too many evenings watching Ian Balina score ICOs on his spreadsheet, live on YouTube. Every other token was going to the moon. Lambos for everyone! And if that wasn’t enough, Suppoman had a fresh 100x coin waiting for me every week.
Looking at the charts, you couldn’t really blame anyone for believing it. ETH started 2017 at around $8 and hit about $1,400 just a year later. BTC went from roughly $1,000 to nearly $20,000. Turns out the real 100x coin was ETH all along.
To join the party, I needed a crypto wallet. I expected a long, painful setup. Instead, I installed a little browser extension with a fox on it, and a few clicks later I had a wallet.
That was it. I was blown away.
They say one year in crypto is like 7 to 10 years in the real world, kind of like dog years. In crypto terms, that was a lifetime ago, but I never forgot that first impression. So when I got the chance to join MetaMask in 2023 and work on the product that got me into crypto in the first place, saying yes was the easiest decision I’ve ever made.
Fixing MetaMask Portfolio
When I joined, MetaMask Portfolio was the web companion to the wallet extension, a place where users could see their assets and do things like swap, bridge, and buy crypto. On paper, it had everything. In practice, it wasn’t working.
We dug into the product and the data, and we quickly saw that Portfolio had three big problems. It was unorganized, with the features that actually brought in revenue tucked away behind a menu. It was unfocused, split somewhere between a web3 tool and a resource page, and not really sure which one it wanted to be. And it was unloved. Despite high traffic, it struggled to keep users around, and its many external links were actively sending them away.
Data doesn’t lie
The numbers told the same story. Bridge was by far the most used feature. People came in, moved their assets from one chain to another, and left. Less than 3% of users came back after the first week.
That being said, there was good news hiding in there too. Over 22 million accounts had connected to Portfolio. The users were already here. We just weren’t giving them a reason to stay.
The catch
At the same time, we were building Tempo, an upgraded trading experience with a much better swap flow and new features like limit orders. It had the potential to change how people used Portfolio, turning it from a quick stop for bridging into a place where they’d actually come back to trade.
There was just one problem. Tempo was going to launch inside Portfolio.
Remember, most people only opened Portfolio to bridge their crypto, and then never came back. That meant most of them would never even find Tempo, no matter how good it was. At that point, we joked, we might as well rename the product “MetaMask Bridge (and other features).”
If we wanted Tempo to succeed, we had to fix Portfolio first.
The pitch
We put together a presentation for the leadership team with a simple vision: strip Portfolio down to the features people actually used and loved, make them easy to find, and improve everything around them. A clear overview of your net worth and holdings, a place to move your crypto, and a place to trade. No clutter, no detours.
What happened next
The pitch worked. We got the green light, and the team spent the following months turning the vision into a real product. We were close to the finish line when the project was paused indefinitely.
Joining the Trade team
After Portfolio was paused, I joined a newly formed Trade team. Our job was to take the MetaMask mobile app and turn it into a place where people actually wanted to trade, with three clear goals:
- Get to feature parity with our competitors
- Increase retention by making the mobile app something people enjoyed coming back to
- Increase company revenue
That was easier said than done. The mobile app was buggy and slow, and the UX felt weird in places. Nothing was consistent either. Different parts of the app looked and behaved differently, as if they’d been designed by different companies.
The market had changed too. When MetaMask launched, it had no real competition. By 2024, that was no longer true. Wallets like Phantom were growing fast and taking a big bite out of our market share. MetaMask was still the most used wallet out there, but the gap was shrinking, and other wallets were offering features we simply didn’t have.
So we got to work.
More than a wallet
Over the next year and a half, MetaMask went from a place where you stored your crypto to a place where you could do pretty much anything with it.
First, we gave MetaMask its own money. mUSD launched in September 2025 as MetaMask’s official stablecoin, a token that’s always worth one US dollar. That gave people a stable place to keep their money inside the wallet, without the ups and downs of regular crypto.
A month later came perpetuals (or perps, for short), which let traders bet on whether a token’s price will go up or down, without actually owning the token. The goal was to bring in $30–60 million in annual recurring revenue in the first 12 months after launch. Perps traders also tend to trade much more often than regular traders, so we expected the feature to more than double our 30-day retention.
Right alongside perps, we made trading more fun. With MetaMask Rewards, we gamified the experience, so people earned points every time they swapped or traded. Every trade now came with a little extra reason to come back.
And all of it connected to the real world through MetaMask Card, which lets people spend their crypto anywhere Mastercard is accepted, from their morning coffee to their Netflix subscription. Every purchase even pays you back in mUSD, so the pieces all fit together.
Finally, in December 2025, we launched MetaMask Predict, built in partnership with Polymarket. It made MetaMask the first self-custodial wallet in the world to offer prediction market trading.
That last one is where I spent most of my time.
Leading the design of MetaMask Predict
Prediction markets let people trade on the outcome of real-world events, from sports and politics to crypto and culture. Will the Lakers win the NBA championship? Will Bitcoin close the year above $100,000? You pick a side, put money behind it, and get paid if you’re right.
While I contributed to a range of Trade team projects, I led the design of Predict. Being first meant there was no playbook to follow. We had to figure out how to take something as complex as prediction markets and make it feel simple, all without people ever handing their money over to someone else.
Predict had two goals. The first was getting more people to actually trade. MetaMask mobile had around 700,000 monthly transacting users, and we wanted 5% of them, roughly 35,000 people, to make at least one prediction each month. The second was getting them to come back. We wanted more than half of prediction market users to return within 30 days. For context, the app’s average 30-day retention at the time was just 13%.
In other words, the bar was set high.
Results
I can’t share the exact numbers, but I can tell you this: we hit every goal we set as a team.
We closed the gap with our competitors and got MetaMask to feature parity. Perps and Predict both reached their targets, bringing in new revenue for the company and giving people a reason to keep coming back to the app.
But the biggest win was harder to measure. A couple of years earlier, MetaMask was the wallet everyone had installed but nobody talked about. Now it was the one making headlines again. We put MetaMask back on the map.
The full circle
Back in 2017, I was just another guy watching ICO livestreams, waiting for my 100x coin to moon. Setting up a wallet with a little fox on it was the easiest part of the whole thing.
Eight years later, I got to lead the design that made that same fox the first self-custodial wallet in the world to offer prediction markets.
Not bad for someone who got into crypto chasing Lambos.
Still no Lambo, though.
Do you like what you see and have a project in mind? Let’s talk!