A lawsuit filed in San Francisco on Tuesday accuses Ethereum-focused developer firm ConsenSys of stealing the origin story of its most important crypto wallet, MetaMask. Joel Dietz, an entrepreneur who says he spearheaded early efforts to build a browser-based digital wallet, claims ConsenSys wrote him out of its history and stole his share of its treasure.
MetaMask is the world’s most widely used crypto wallet and the powerhouse asset of Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin’s ConsenSys, a company last valued at $7 billion in early 2022, said a ConsenSys spokesperson.
Dietz claims he created the intellectual property that became MetaMask in late 2014, when he founded a project called Vapor. He accuses Aaron Davis, whom he says he hired in 2015 to help code Vapor, of betraying him and conspiring instead with ConsenSys.
Joel Dietz is an individual we understand to have been falsely marketing himself as the founder of MetaMask in an attempt to sell tokens or gain investment from unsuspecting investors globally, said the ConsenSys spokesperson. Joel Dietz is not a founder of MetaMask, has no relation to MetaMask or any of its technology and we look forward to the court promptly disposing of these frivolous claims.
Dietz said he pitched his vision for an in-browser crypto wallet to key Ethereum figures Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood in November 2014 and got an initial sign-off from them to build it. He said he applied for a grant from the Ethereum Foundation in March 2015, having brought on two partners, Martin Becze and Aaron Davis.
Within this group, Dietz fashioned himself as the product’s visionary, spokesperson and fundraiser, while Becze and Davis were its primary coders, according to the lawsuit.
Dietz said he shifted his focus to other ventures in May 2015, not hearing anything to prove otherwise from Davis. One year later, ConsenSys debuted MetaMask, the Chrome browser extension that made it easy for anyone to send, spend and swap cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum blockchain.
At this point, Dietz said he pieced together the exact relationship linking his Vapor and ConsenSys’ MetaMask, and became convinced that he had been wronged. These were things that Vitalik specifically asked me to do – and then they just never compensated me at all for anything, he said. So, it feels kind of like a rigged insider game.