Written by: Pzai, Foresight News
On May 14, MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay said in a podcast that the wallet team is still considering launching a native token for the wallet. Although there seems to be no clear plan at present, Finlay pointed out that it is safe to issue more types of tokens under the more relaxed Trump administration regulatory system.
As early as 2021, MetaMask engineer Erik Marks proposed the idea of token issuance, and ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin also tweeted that year that tokens attracted market attention. But now, the market is more concerned about the TGE process of Linea, a Layer 2 product under ConsenSys. On March 8, Linea announced that it would not issue coins in the first quarter of 2025, which aroused the communitys doubts about the progress of TGE. In such an environment of public opinion, will ConsenSys take another approach and surprise the majority of wallet users?
In the wallet war, is issuing coins a way to differentiate yourself from the competition?
As the leading wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, despite the repeated postponements of coin issuance, MetaMask, with its huge scale of 3 million monthly active users, has always made the token airdrop expectation the focus of community attention. Judging from the transaction data, the current transaction flow of Metamask Swap is relatively small, with a daily transaction volume of less than US$100 million for a long time, and far lower than the transaction volume of the Solana on-chain platform. At a time when the market liquidity trend is greatly biased towards the Solana chain, Metamask is gradually losing its share in the trading market, from 77% at the end of 2022 to less than 3% today. Although Metamask actively connects with developers through tools such as Snap to introduce external chain wallets such as Solana, it still cannot compete with the rapid growth of various exchange wallets in trading products.
In todays market environment, MetaMask may achieve decentralized operations through DAO governance tokens, and deeply bind token functions with cross-chain interactions and even fee rebates, etc., to strengthen its position as a multi-chain hub. Although this delayed gratification strategy is slightly PUA, it also allows the community to continue to use the Swap function and participate in cross-chain transactions in order to increase the weight of airdrops. As major exchanges actively expand their wallet product lines and gather on-chain liquidity, issuing coins is also an opportunity for differentiated competition, in order to recover liquidity while increasing user activity.
In addition, as the market environment warms up, the loosening of the regulatory environment also provides a compliance basis for coin issuance. For example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued ConsenSys in June last year and accused MetaMask of being an unregistered securities broker and suspected of illegally providing securities offers and trading services, but then on February 28, the SEC planned to withdraw the enforcement lawsuit against ConsenSys and MetaMask.
Due to Lineas procrastination, there are few expectations for wallet coin issuance?
As an Ethereum Layer 2 project under ConsenSys, Linea has attracted users to participate in ecological tasks with the star halo of backed by MetaMask since the mainnet was launched in 2023, and promised to airdrop tokens to early supporters through the LXP (Linea Experience Points) points system. However, the token generation event (TGE) originally scheduled for the first quarter of 2025 was postponed to the second quarter. The official reasons included token economics needs to be improved and complex legal procedures, but the community generally believes that these arguments lack substantive evidence and question their essence as an excuse for infinite delay. And because other Layer 2 (such as Starknet and zkSync) have successfully issued coins during the same period, Lineas lagging progress has caused user funds to be locked in the ecosystem, and the opportunity cost has soared.
From the data, Linea chain assets are constantly flowing into other ecosystems, and the scale of cross-chain assets is less than 300 million US dollars. Linea product manager Declan Fox said that the TGE will be held after the market turns from bearish to bullish. Under the current market trend, as a public chain project with a pre-market FDV of around 2-3 billion US dollars, we can look forward to Lineas TGE.
