Onboarding the Next Billion: MetaMask's Michael Lwin on Wallets, Self-Custody, and Bitcoin Trading

In episode four of the Bullish on Bitcoin Show, BOB co-founder Alexei Zamyatin spoke with Michael Lwin, Senior Director of Product at MetaMask — one of the industry's most widely used self-custodial wallets. A relative newcomer to the MetaMask team (he previously spent three years at Trust Wallet and cut his teeth at a16z before that), Lwin brought an outsider's perspective to a conversation about how far wallets have evolved from simple signers, what "the next billion users" will actually expect from crypto, and why, despite years of progress, Bitcoin still trades so little on-chain relative to centralized exchanges. Here's a rundown of the highlights.

From Browser Signer to Personal Finance App

Lwin traced MetaMask's arc from a wallet built largely for OGs and Web3 developers — highly customizable, but requiring users to manually wire up RPC connections — toward something far more mainstream. As competition intensified and crypto matured, the priority shifted toward working "out of the box," including native support for major non-EVM chains like Bitcoin, Solana, and Tron.

Alexei asked directly whether MetaMask is still "just a wallet," Lwin didn't hesitate:

"It's not just a wallet anymore... it's really personal finance or wealth management…"

He pointed to MetaMask's own stablecoin, mUSD — which currently offers a 3% annual bonus to users who on-ramp into it — as an early signal of that direction, alongside built-in perps, prediction markets, a unified swap-and-bridge experience, and the MetaMask card for real-world spending. More yield-generating features are planned before the end of the year.

Will Users Even Know They're On-Chain?

Alexei pushed on whether this evolution points toward a future where MetaMask becomes indistinguishable from apps like Revolut or Cash App — where users never think about which chain they're on. Lwin's answer was a qualified "not necessarily." While RPC configuration is already invisible for the eight major chains MetaMask supports, he was clear that security and self-custody will remain core to the product, even as the interface gets simpler for mainstream users:

"We need to address that actually crypto is now becoming mainstream — which is actually kind of a victory for crypto — and we need to be mindful of that, but we will also be mindful of the unique value propositions of crypto."

On why self-custody retains an edge over even the best fintech apps, Lwin cited concrete pain points: cross-border transfers still take four or five business days even through modern fintech rails, layered with fees and custodian freeze risk. Crypto, he argued, settles in minutes — or, as he and Alexei joked, "not yet seconds" in Bitcoin's case, but still far faster than the status quo. He also pointed to self-custody's outsized value for users facing high local inflation, capital controls, or untrustworthy banking systems — a philosophy shaped by his own background: he cited his family's experience with the Myanmar military coup as part of what drew him to self-custodial technology in the first place.

The Stickiness Problem

Alexei raised a structural tension: on-chain accounts are composable and portable — a user can move between wallets, DEXs, and aggregators freely — which is great for users but makes retention harder for any single provider, unlike traditional apps like Revolut where switching costs keep users locked in. Lwin framed this as healthy pressure rather than a weakness:

"We have to prove ourselves every day... are we threading the needle, right? Are we, as crypto moves mainstream, providing value to those users?"

He described MetaMask's retention strategy as a balancing act between serving newer, mainstream users and continuing to deliver for crypto-native power users — arguing that if MetaMask stops innovating at the frontier, it risks falling behind as new categories of blockchain use become mainstream later, much as Bitcoin itself went from an obscure whitepaper to global relevance.

Custody Is Getting Blurrier, Not Clearer

Alexei observed that the line between custodial and non-custodial products has become far less obvious than it once was — smart accounts with multi-key setups, wallets that route funds into custodial yield vaults, and other hybrid designs make it harder for new users to know what they're actually holding. Lwin agreed this is a real challenge, noting that centralized exchanges still offer a genuine advantage: institutional-grade infrastructure backed by legal recourse if something goes wrong. Self-custody, he said, has to close that trust gap by building more robust, battle-tested solutions — work he said MetaMask has active workstreams underway to address, without going into specifics.

Bitcoin in MetaMask: A Counterintuitive Use Case

The conversation turned to MetaMask's native Bitcoin support — a milestone Alexei noted personally, since BOB had previously built a Bitcoin Snap (a MetaMask extension) to bridge the gap before native support existed. Lwin shared what he called a genuinely counterintuitive finding: EVM users like holding and swapping into native Bitcoin, not just synthetic exposure via perps or wrapped BTC — something he attributed to Bitcoin's status as "the OG token." Equally, native Bitcoin holders regularly swap into stablecoins, and some users stake BTC through platforms like Babylon or Lombard while remaining connected to the broader EVM DeFi ecosystem.

Alexei connected this to BOB's own data: Bitcoin-to-Ethereum is actually the most traded pair across cross-chain Bitcoin protocols, ahead of Bitcoin-to-stables — evidence, he argued, that the once-separate Bitcoin and Ethereum communities have substantially merged. He also noted that BOB's own monthly Bitcoin swap volume nearly doubled recently, from roughly $500 million to $840 million, even as it remains a tiny fraction of the roughly $800 billion in monthly Bitcoin-to-dollar volume on centralized exchanges.

Why Institutions Still Won't Touch On-Chain Bitcoin Trading

Alexei asked why on-chain trading still lags so far behind centralized exchanges, Lwin pointed to the institutional-retail split: roughly 75% of centralized exchange volume comes from institutional traders, who are far less willing to park large sums on infrastructure without the liquidity depth, matching-engine speed, and sophisticated feature set they're used to. He was blunt about the speed problem for high-frequency use cases:

"You're not going to get institutional traders who are doing programmatic trading... calling the Hyperliquid API on centralized exchange. They're not using a UI, they're calling Binance or OKX's API... every millisecond counts. There's just no way."

That's part of why BTC perpetual futures dominate — as a synthetic instrument, a perp sidesteps Bitcoin's settlement speed entirely. Lwin cited HyperLiquid's rise to roughly 12% of total perps volume as proof that decentralized venues can meaningfully compete when the product is genuinely excellent, even against exchanges like Binance that still command roughly half the market.

Alexei added a second, related pain point his own team hears constantly from users: pricing transparency. Because most Bitcoin swap protocols only lock in a final exchange rate ten to twenty minutes after a transaction is sent, users systematically lose out — his estimate put the cost at roughly 30 basis points per trade on average, a cost centralized exchanges simply don't impose. He noted BOB currently has a faster-settlement solution in testing aimed specifically at closing that gap for retail users moving in and out of positions, even if matching a centralized engine's speed for institutional-grade trading isn't realistic in the near term.

The Bull Case: Stablecoins, Regulation, and the Cold-Start Problem

Both agreed the bigger unlock may not be trading infrastructure at all, but regulatory clarity. Alexei argued that centralized exchanges historically dominated partly because operating one required navigating serious regulatory complexity — a barrier that's eroding as frameworks like MiCA make licensing more accessible to smaller players. As stablecoin on-ramps proliferate, he suggested, users will have less reason to route through a centralized exchange at all before acquiring Bitcoin.

Lwin agreed directionally but flagged the classic cold-start problem: even if Bitcoin's technical constraints improve, on-chain venues still need to bootstrap the kind of deep, professional market-making liquidity that centralized exchanges and HyperLiquid took years to build. He was optimistic it's solvable, and pointed to a broader trend he sees as underappreciated: as more of personal and business finance — mortgages, commercial paper, cross-border remittances — moves on-chain, self-custody's border-agnostic nature becomes a structural advantage that geo-gated custodial platforms can't easily replicate. Alexei backed this with a concrete data point from BOB's own users: roughly 60% of BOB Gateway's power users also use the Bitcoin yield product Yield Basis, suggesting real correlation between on-chain trading activity and broader on-chain personal finance behavior.

Watch the Full Episode

This recap covers the main threads, but the full conversation goes deeper on MetaMask's stablecoin roadmap, the mechanics of intent-based Bitcoin liquidity, and where self-custody still needs to catch up to centralized exchanges on trading features. Watch the complete episode of the Bullish on Bitcoin Show with Michael Lwin here:

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