As the former lead of operations for MetaMask at ConsenSys, Jacobc.eth saw firsthand the kind of friction that prevents DeFi from reaching the masses, and he was one of the first to realize that there’s no fixing it. At least, not how most have envisioned it.
Now with CoinFello, Jacobc.eth is targeting the biggest bottleneck of all in the crypto realm – the user interface itself. His goal is not to reduce the number of clicks required to send funds from A to B, nor help anyone to understand the complexities of whatever blockchain network they happen to be using. Instead, he wants to abstract all of this away and transition users from the clunky UI to a world of “intent-based execution.”
By leveraging self-sovereign AI agents, CoinFello is eliminating the need for clicks altogether and building 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 mean the end of “DeFi” altogether.
1: You helped scale MetaMask to become the gateway for millions to explore DeFi. Now you’re building CoinFello, and you’re trying to replace the broken UI of crypto. How did your time overseeing operations at MetaMask convince you that autonomous agents are a better solution to trying to fix the UI, like others have attempted?
The truth is that the current user experience of using smart contracts was actually unintentional. The current paradigm of browser extensions and website dApps was meant for early Ethereum developers, not end-users. The website dApp introduced MANY problems: a bad user experience that was nearly impossible on mobile devices, and a phishing security nightmare. The website dApps are confusing to use, and they get hacked and point at malicious smart contracts, causing major fund loss incidents to become commonplace.
As we watched the capabilities of AI agents grow, we realized that these agents weren’t just useful for making a bot for a specific use case. These agents could actually fulfill the vision of a single entry point to everything that is happening onchain, and they can remove 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 are a common user experience that already billions of people can easily understand. And they are resistant to the most important security dangers of the previous paradigm.
2: One of CoinFello’s biggest innovations is its spending permissions feature, enabling the agent to transact without controlling the user’s private keys. Can you explain how this works, and how it relieves anxiety for users who are still paranoid about “handing over their keys”?
Paranoia is a very healthy instinct in crypto, and users are right to be concerned about agents, because most today do require control of your wallet keys. We are the first agent to leverage new Ethereum standards that allow the user to enforce which assets the agent can access, how much of them it can access, how these assets are allowed to be used, and for how long the agent is allowed to use them. You can think of it as a kind of valet – you don’t give it your private key, all you do is grant it a single, very specific permission to perform a very narrow range of tasks and automations. Automations can range from many management of a loan position, dollar cost averaging, automated trading strategies, and many other kinds of actions.
The key remains securely in the user’s control, and users can bring their current wallet without giving the agent control of this wallet. Spending permissions ensure that even if the agent were to go completely rogue, it physically cannot complete any unauthorized actions. This agent can prepare the transaction and execute it within those guardrails, but it never has the chance to run away with your funds or do anything you haven’t given it 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 because it allowed users to carry their wallet and assets between every game, and it aggregated every game store. We’ve brought the same values of permissionless interoperability of assets to CoinFello, and many aspects of the strategy are shared between these products.
4: The basic premise of CoinFello is that users can enter natural language instructions, such as “stake my $ETH to obtain the best possible yield.” It then abstracts away all of the complexity to perform a smart contract call on their behalf. Can you tell us about your “aha!” moment, when you first realized that AI would be able to do this? And does this make DeFi more attractive to non-crypto natives, and if so, how?
For most people, DeFi is wildly complicated, but AI can abstract most of that out of the way, acting like 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 it does all the grunt work for you – the on-ramping, the gas, selecting the protocol – DeFi becomes a lot more palatable and interesting.
5: You’ve long been a vocal proponent of the idea of self-sovereign AI. Can you explain what this means, and why you believe so strongly in this idea, especially as far as financial AI agents are concerned?
There is a pretty big problem happening where centralized AI owned by a small handful of corporations is becoming the primary way that people use the internet in general. This problem is much worse when AI comes to manage money. In order for crypto to remain self-custodial, the agent, the model, and the hosted environment must be controlled only by the user’s keys.
When it comes to your own personal finances, autonomy should be non-negotiable. We need self-sovereign AI agents, where everything is under the user’s control. It has to 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 away in a “black box,” this creates obvious trust issues for crypto users. How is CoinFello ensuring 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 for a future of cryptographically verifiable AI. This means that users should have cryptographic assurances that the AI model they’ve selected is indeed the model that they believe they are running. 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. Next, a transaction plan is produced that the user can review before it is executed. 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 swap $ETH for USDT and the AI tries to do something different, like send your funds to a null address, the court of agents will see this, or in the worst-case scenario, the protocol itself prevents the agent from acting in an unapproved way. The simulated outcome won’t match the agent’s permissions, and so it’s not allowed to do it. We’re not saying to trust the agent’s own logic; we’re saying that we are implementing layers of security that sit above any individual agent.
7: What’s your vision for CoinFello? I mean, what is the DeFi world going to look like 5-10 years from now? What role will humans have in this future?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the term “DeFi” ultimately disappears and just comes to be known as “finance.” I mean, who really knows about the TCP/IP protocols that underpin the internet today? As AI becomes more popular and sophisticated, we will see new layers of abstraction away from dealing with the DeFi protocols themselves, but rather treating those as underlying primitives.
The complexity of blockchain will become almost invisible, and crypto will eat most of the TradFi market with its superior rails and operations. As for people, we’ll stop being operators and start being orchestrators. There won’t be any need to waste time checking gas fees or researching protocol yields, because our agents will do this for us. We’ll just set higher-level goals, and our agents will make sure we can achieve them in the most efficient way possible. That’s where I see this heading.
If Jacobc.eth gets his way, DeFi will transform into a far more welcoming world, where simplicity reigns supreme, enabling everyone to focus on their long-term financial goals rather than worry about “how” they’re going to achieve them. The broken UI will be replaced by sophisticated and trusted, self-sovereign AI agents that have one goal – to ensure the best possible outcomes for their users.
