Ethereum’s most popular DeFi wallet announced a partnership with the VillageDAO to scale customer support in a decentralized and secure manner. Consensys wasn’t able to comment on which tokens will be used to incentivize VillageDAO members, but we speculate a native MASK token could be used for this utility in the future.
The Metamask, VillageDAO Partnership: With 40 million monthly active users, Metamask is the most popular Ethereum ETH/USD wallet for DeFi users and NFT collectors. We talked to Consensys at Permissionless to get more details on why Metamask is partnering with VillageDAO and how the VillageDAO intends to scale to the entirety of DeFi on Ethereum.
Dror Avieli, VP of customer success at Consensys, commented on Metamask’s exponential growth and scaling customer support.
“You cannot continue to grow like that. Soon you need a team like Coinbase with 3,000 or whatever on its support team. I came to the conclusion that we need to decentralize, and the team started to talk about it and fell in love with the idea.”
Looking toward the future, we asked Avieli how Consensys will scale to reach a billion users.
“With the mix of the changes we did last year and with the VillageDAO, I’m welcoming the 1 billion, and I’m looking for the challenge to support 1 billion [users]. Very excited. Yes, because I think we will be ready with the mix of changes and know whenever it comes, we’ll be ready.”
Next, we asked Avieli how VillageDAO contributors will be incentivized to contribute to the DAO, and if the MASK tokens will be involved.
In regards to MASK tokens, Dror responded teasingly, “Which token?”
He then followed:
“It was clear we needed to do something regarding monetization. The details of that are still not clear because, you know, putting a monetization system in place with some gamification, it’s not an easy exercise. Metamask will be the first brand to go live once this whole system is ready. But for me, one of the goals is that eventually the VillageDAO will take the toll of the majority of the ecosystem support.”
Avieli also explained how a future revenue model may work for VillageDAO. Without going into detail on the process, protocols may fund the DAO’s treasury in order to pay contributors to conduct customer support for their protocols.
“And well, in this pilot, we have a limited number of people that actually get access to the VillageDAO users, and these experts are actually helping during a design partnership phase, checking the mechanics of the tools and everything related to that. The next phase will be checking the mechanics of the configuration, and then Metamask will be the first brand to go live once this whole system is ready.”
This begs the question: how does Metamask plan to pay for customer support at the scale of 40 million users? Relative to its user-base, Consensus doesn’t make much revenue. Could a native token to Metamask be the solution?
