Deep Dive into MetaMask Snaps with Erik Marks

Erik Marks is the director of product for permissionless innovation at MetaMask.

MetaMask, the popular non-custodial wallet owned by Consensys, has been in the spotlight following the launch of Snaps on open beta. You can think of Snaps as plugins that allow developers to add new and different apps that we can use in MetaMask.

One of the biggest implications of this is that Snaps will connect MetaMask to non-Ethereum chains, including Bitcoin and Solana.

In our conversation, we dive deep into the vision and the broader implications of Snaps. But first, Erik will go over the basics of this new product.

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7 Key Takeaways

1. Snaps is our way of letting users customize their experience of using their wallet and adding functionality to Metamask
2. The Open beta focuses on 3 use cases: Interoperability, Notifications, and Transaction insights. Interoperability: multi-chain, support for Bitcoin, Solana, and other L1s. Notifications: to notify users of transactions completed, ENS renewal reminders, and on-chain events. Transaction Insights: for Ethereum users, security-related, if the Snap finds the transaction suspicious it can show a warning to the user.
3. With the introduction of Snaps, Metamask is making themselves have many of the same responsibilities as an operating system, in terms of managing, distrusting programs, interacting with each other and interacting with their APIs, and ensuring they get the resources they need to function.
4. Permissionless innovation means anyone in the Web3 ecosystem, any Metamask user, and any dApp developer, builds and distributes whatever functionality they want without going through a centralized gatekeeper.
5. Snaps and the permissionless innovation strategy, give users and developers more control over what they build, what they do, and how they experience their applications.
6. Snaps is ultimately a more permissionless and scalable model rather than trying to build a universal web3 interface as a single centralized organization. From a business point of view, with Snaps anyone can extend Metamask in whatever way they want and use a Metamask for whatever purpose they want.
7. The long-term vision is that it should be extremely easy to move between different dApps and protocols seamlessly without long delays and installing multiple different applications.

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