DeFi Visions: Jordan Spence

The new installment of DeFi Visions, a series of video interviews in which 1inch talks to the most prominent projects and personalities in DeFi, features the main takeaways from a recent interview with MetaMask’s Jordan Spence.

Jordan Spence’s journey with the Ethereum ecosystem began in mid-2017. “I hadn’t heard about Ethereum until May of 2017,” he recalls. “[Back then], I had a friend reach out, ‘Hey, have you heard about this thing called Ethereum?’ I ended up buying some Ethereum that same night.”

“I bought it at around $20, and it was $250 the next month or so,” he goes on to say. “I wanted to get more Ethereum as a result of this!”

Jordan’s next step was to try to get into the business side of Ethereum. He reached out to MyEtherWallet’s current CEO Taylor Monahan and was hired parttime, Jordan says, adding that after about six months he got a full-time position at MEW and then went on to work with MyCrypto and then with MetaMask and ConsenSys.

“There have been scary, tumultuous times on the markets, volatility and cycles, but I’ve never really wanted to leave [the crypto space],” he comments.

The conversation takes place amidst a bear market, but Jordan says the present cycle could also bring about some good things to the crypto industry.

“It’s not all about buying crypto, it’s not all about trading, it’s not all about the price of things in the ‘the numbers go up’ narrative,” he observes. “A bear market is a fantastic opportunity to reassess a lot of things, like ‘Why are we in this space in the first place? What are we building? How do we build sustainably?’”

Jordan says he is quite excited for Ethereum’s upcoming switch from the Proof of Work consensus algorithm to Proof of Stake: “The biggest thing is the fact that it’s going to reduce the carbon footprint of Ethereum by 99.5 percent or something. Considering the fact that a lot of people are hesitant to enter into crypto or Ethereum because of the potential carbon footprint impact, the switch to Proof of Stake is going to be a huge benefit to those people.”

Speaking about features of crypto wallets that are required by users but are not yet there, Jordan brings up more expansive NFT support. “The mobile MetaMask wallet has NFT support, but I personally would like to see more NFT support on the extension,” he explains. “We’ve also had users request things like staking directly within MetaMask, and I think this is a possibility in the future.”

Picking up on the NFT subject, Jordan says: “When we saw NFTs shoot up like a rocket in mid-2021, the reason behind it was for artistic purposes. At least, that was the primary driver of it.”

“But I think a lot of people lost the point that NFTs can have quite a lot of really cool utilities,” he adds. “We are going to see for NFTs a similar reassessment and figuring out what NFTs can provide in value for the space, and not just from an artistic standpoint, but from a utility standpoint. I’d like to see more emphasis on NFTs as concert tickets, for example, or even an NFT that represents lodging in a hotel.”

Moving to the subject of DAOs, Jordan offers that at this point, DAOs are “experimental.” “The idea of decentralized governance is a good idea,” he elaborates. “[But] it might take us a long time to get to a point where it makes sense for more companies to try doing this.”

Watch the full interview with Jordan Spence on The 1inch Network’s YouTube channel.