Interview with Guillaume Dechaux, Managing Director at Consensys | EBC11

Hello everyone. We are here at the 11th European Blockchain Conference Blockchain Conference , day two. We start our day with Gyong Dashu, Managing Director of Consensys. Good morning. How are you?

Good morning. Thank you for inviting me. Of course. Glad to be here. How do you like Barcelona at the moment?

Yes, it was great. Many interesting people, many institutions, and yes, I was surprised by the level of other participants. It's great to be here. This is definitely one of the best events that I believe this industry has to offer. You're from Consensys, you just said you 've been working there for eight years, right?

Yes, eight years. That's a long time. It's like a century, but yes. MetaMask is probably the first gateway for people entering the crypto world. This is the easiest onboarding, most user-friendly experience.

Tell us a little about what you’ve created to drive mass adoption and engagement. For my part, I am working in a different direction, but I will be happy to talk about MetaMask. Indeed, you may have noticed that MetaMask has been releasing many new features over the years. Users have complained a bit about the user experience in MetaMask, but it is changing dramatically. But people should know that MetaMask is not built for 50 or 100 million, it is built for billions of people.

But every time we release something, it has to go through the entire stack and all the teams involved. So among all the things that have been launched recently, the latest is MetaMask rewards. Which is quite interesting. I think Joe mentioned that eventually there might be a MetaMask token be a MetaMask token . We'll see.

But there is a roadmap for MetaMask to launch decentralized exchanges. We already have a DEX, but Linea will be integrated into MetaMask very soon. Other ways will appear ; In fact, MetaMask is becoming the home and main door to Web3. This is quite interesting. You mentioned that you are working on the Linea direction, which was also recently launched as Layer 2.

Tell us a little about the process of what you built there for developers. That's interesting, Leah, because it's not a new project. It originated in a research team mostly based in Paris. It all started in 2019. We see a lot of L2s on the market, but this is a truly amazing project because the approach they took is very different from others.

The main L2s you know are Arbitrum and Optimism. But they use optimistic rollups. They did what we call zk-rollup. Essentially, they take all the smart take all the smart contracts, convert them into mathematical formulas, and then send them to the mainnet. It's 10 times cheaper and 10 times faster, so we really believe it's a game changer.

The second thing about Linea is its unique tokenomics unique tokenomics . We wanted to be 100% . We wanted to be 100% consistent with Ethereum. So the whole tokenomics is about burning Linea tokens, but more importantly, also burning ETH. So, the more transactions there are in Linea, the more ETH we burn.

It's just a way to get more value back into Ethereum. It is true that for the past few years, the price of ETH has been consistently compared to Bitcoin, reaching 20,000 while ETH was at 2,000. You may have seen it rising now, and I think with our unique tokenomics aligned with Ethereum, it will rise even more. So, Linea is also fully open source. You may have heard, and I can't comment on this, that many financial solutions are considering Linea because of its unique capabilities unique capabilities .

We have Linea; Since Linea is open source, we can imagine what we call app-chains. App-chains—it's just a copy of Linea where you can deploy your own Linea chain, and I think that's quite important for finance because they want to control sponsorship. They want to control everything, be permissionless, but at the same time have some KYC on the network to make sure all institutions are vetted. They also need privacy need privacy , and I think Linea will provide all of that. We have a very busy technical roadmap .

In our technical language, we say that the quality of a chain is measured through the L2 classification. So, very soon we will reach the first stage, like in Arbitrum, and in the first quarter of 2026 the goal is to reach the second stage, which is the highest level of compatibility with Berion. So yes, we have a lot of work ahead of us. So what do you think is the most exciting thing about the 2026 roadmap , either for Linea or for Consensys in general? Um, what milestones inspire you the most?

Well , even I don't have time to follow all the initiatives. Last week, MetaMask rewards were announced, and a few months before that, the MetaMask stablecoin. We have a MetaMask card. The MetaMask card is also unique because for the first time, you can spend your stablecoin directly in- store. You don't need to convert it to your local currency first.

You just go to just go to any store and you can spend your USDC or even MUSD via card. This is great. I think all of these recent initiatives we've implemented at MetaMask will be significant for Linea in 2026. It is primarily about growth. We started with $2 billion in FDV, but we are confident that significantly more ETH will pass through our bridge .

We're launching in the coming weeks what we call a native bridge— native bridge— sorry, native yield—just for moving to the Linea network. Users who invest in certain dApps or underlying assets will receive income automatically. So, Linea is indeed aligned with Ethereum; you earn income just by coming to Linea. This is a launch in early December. And again December.

And again , all the technical progress I mentioned earlier, including the achievement of the second stage on L2beat, is already in the works and will be implemented in the first quarter of 2026. Surprisingly. That's very interesting to hear. We look forward to bringing all of this to life. Thank you very much for joining us.

Oh, thank you very much for your time. Thank you.