As the former head of operations for MetaMask at ConsenSys, Jacobc.eth saw firsthand the kind of friction that keeps DeFi from reaching the masses, and he was one of the first to realize there is no solution. At least, not in the way most imagined.
With CoinFello, Jacobc.eth is now focusing on the biggest bottleneck in the crypto world: the user interface itself. His goal isn’t to reduce the number of clicks it takes to send money from A to B, nor to help anyone understand the complexities of whatever blockchain network they’re using. Instead, he wants to abstract all of this and transport users from the clunky user interface to a world of ‘intent-based execution’.
By using self-sovereign AI agents, CoinFello eliminates the need for clicks altogether and builds a future where crypto users are no longer “operators” but simply define their goals and sit back and watch it happen. And if he succeeds, it could spell the end of “DeFi.”
1: You helped scale MetaMask to become the gateway for millions of people to explore DeFi. Now you build CoinFello and try to replace crypto’s broken UI. How did your time monitoring operations at MetaMask convince you that autonomous agents are a better solution for fixing the UI as others have tried?
The truth is that the current user experience using smart contracts was actually unintentional. The current paradigm of browser extensions and website dApps was intended for early Ethereum developers, not end users. The website dApp introduced a LOT of problems: a poor user experience that was almost impossible on mobile devices, and a phishing security nightmare. The website dApps are confusing to use, and they are hacked and linked to malicious smart contracts, making major fund loss incidents common.
As we saw the capabilities of AI agents grow, we realized that these agents were useful for more than just creating a bot for a specific use case. These agents could essentially fulfill the vision of a single point of access to everything that happens in the chain, and they could eliminate the danger of not being able to understand what a smart contract will do and blindly trusting it.
Agents also work well on mobile, where the vast majority of users are. They form a common user experience that billions of people can easily understand. And they can withstand the key security threats of the previous paradigm.
2: One of CoinFello’s biggest innovations is its spend permissions feature, which allows the agent to make transactions without checking the user’s private keys. Can you explain how this works and how it takes the fear out of users who are still paranoid about “handing over their keys”?
Paranoia is a very healthy instinct in crypto, and users are right to worry about agents, as most of them today require control over your wallet keys. We are the first agent to leverage new Ethereum standards that allow the user to enforce what assets the agent can access, how many of them can access, how those assets can be used, and for how long the agent can use them. You can think of it as a kind of servant: you don’t give it your private key, all you do is give it a single, very specific permission to perform a very limited number of tasks and automations. Automations can range from many loan position management, dollar cost calculations, automated trading strategies and many other types of actions.
The key remains securely in the user’s control and users can take their current wallet with them without giving the agent control over that wallet. Issuing permissions ensures that even if the agent were to act completely recklessly, he cannot physically perform any unauthorized actions. This agent can prepare and execute the transaction within these guardrails, but never has the chance to run away with your money or do anything you haven’t given him explicit permission to do..
3: You also founded HyperPlay to streamline Web3 gaming. What did your time there teach you about the complexities of interacting with crypto and users’ lack of patience that you are now applying to CoinFello?
The HyperPlay product became the best place to play Web3 games, as users could carry their wallets and belongings between each game, and each game store was merged. We’ve brought the same values of permissionless asset interoperability to CoinFello, and many aspects of the strategy are shared between these products.
4: The premise of CoinFello is that users can enter natural language instructions such as “stake my $ETH to achieve the best possible return.” It then removes all the complexity of making a smart contract call on their behalf. Can you tell us about your “aha!” moment when you first realized AI could do this? And does this make DeFi more attractive to non-crypto natives, and if so, how?
For most people, DeFi is extremely complicated, but AI can take most of that out of the way and act as a kind of autopilot for DeFi users. When you can tell your personal agent to save $100 a week in a high-yield account, and they do all the heavy lifting for you – the ramping, the fueling, selecting the protocol – DeFi becomes a lot more palatable and interesting.
5: You have long been an outspoken proponent of the idea of self-sovereign AI. Can you explain what this means and why you believe so strongly in this idea, especially when it comes to financial AI agents?
There’s a pretty big problem emerging where centralized AI, owned by a small handful of companies, becomes the primary way people use the internet in general. This problem will be much worse when AI starts managing money. For crypto to be self-managing, the agent, model, and hosted environment must be managed only by the user’s keys.
When it comes to your own personal finances, autonomy is non-negotiable. We need self-sovereign AI agents, where everything is under the user’s control. It should be an extension of your own sovereignty, not a spy for some tech giant.
6: When the reasoning of agentic AI systems is not clear, hidden in a ‘black box’, it creates obvious trust issues for crypto users. How does CoinFello ensure that its agents’ decisions are always transparent, and what safeguards are in place to prevent “hallucinations” that could cost DeFi users money?
We are building a future of cryptographically verifiable AI. This means that users must have cryptographic guarantees that the AI model they have selected is indeed the one they think they are using. We also protect against the hallucination problem by orchestrating many different agents that review a proposed transaction before it is ever presented to a user. A transaction plan is then created for the user to view before execution. And finally, the user approves the spending permissions for the agent, and the agent cannot use funds in any other way at the protocol level.
So if you tell the agent to trade $ETH because USDT and the AI are trying to do something else, like send your money to a null address, the court of agents will see this, or in the worst case the protocol itself prevents the agent from acting in an unapproved manner. The simulated result does not match the agent’s permissions, and therefore it is not allowed to do this. We are not saying that we should trust the agent’s own logic; we say we implement layers of security above each individual agent.
7: What is your vision for CoinFello? I mean, what will the DeFi world look like in 5-10 years? What role will humans play in this future?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the term ‘DeFi’ eventually disappears and becomes known as ‘finance’. I mean, who really knows the TCP/IP protocols that underpin the Internet today? As AI becomes more popular and sophisticated, we will see new layers of abstraction that no longer deal with the DeFi protocols themselves, but rather treat them as underlying primitives.
The complexity of blockchain will become almost invisible, and crypto will swallow up most of the TradFi market with its superior rails and operations. As for the people, we will no longer be operators, but orchestrators. You don’t have to waste time checking gas costs or researching protocol returns because our agents do this for us. We just set higher level goals and our agents ensure we can achieve them in the most efficient way. There I see this headline.
If Jacobc.eth has its way, DeFi will transform into a much more hospitable world, where simplicity reigns supreme, allowing everyone to focus on their long-term financial goals rather than worrying about “how” they are going to achieve them. The broken user interface will be replaced by advanced and trusted, self-sovereign AI agents that have one goal: to ensure the best possible results for their users.