Dan Finlay, co-founder of the crypto wallet platform MetaMask, recently conducted a hands-on experiment with memecoins to examine issues of consent and trust within the Web3 ecosystem.

Minting the two tokens — “Consent” on Ethereum and “I Don’t Consent” on Solana — Finlay experienced firsthand what he described as “deeply unpleasant in predictable ways.”

The experiment quickly descended into an unsettling glance at the intersection of hype and responsibility, tying his experiences to a wider debate regarding data consent in artificial intelligence and public platforms.

Finlay’s findings are significant, as the implications span beyond Web3, highlighting the blurred lines between public visibility and user expectations and the need for clearer systems of consent, trust and accountability. He explained:

“This isn’t an appeal to ethics, this is an appeal to making better products. Your app doesn’t need to become a pool of toxic waste. Your community doesn’t need to be peppered with people issuing personal threats. Your shares don’t have to be diluted by anonymous whales.”

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Memecoins and financial risks

The MetaMask co-founder’s experiment offers critical insights into the speculative and risky nature of memecoins, which he launched using Ethereum’s Clanker bot and Solana’s Pump.fun platform.

In launching the two tokens, Finlay found that rapid trading activity significantly inflated their value, briefly pushing the co-founder’s holdings to over $100,000.

However, a lack of clear structure and purpose for the tokens left participants open to financial losses, which Finlay explained resulted in people “constantly trying to assign greater meaning to.”

Finlay faced backlash from investors, some of whom threatened him or begged for long-term plans for the assets despite the tokens’ simplistic design. Assessing the experiment and its findings, he wrote:

“The only act of consent that seems unambiguous in this memecoin environment is that the buyers are definitely consenting to put their money into something. But without that thing being well defined, what kind of consent is that, anyway?”

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Blurring the lines of consent

In reflection of the experiment, Finlay drew parallels between the memecoin space and debates about consent in digital platforms — particularly AI — referring to Bluesky, where a data set of public posts was used for AI training without explicit user consent.

Finlay observed a “disconnect between the protocol expectations of consent and the social expectations of consent” on Bluesky, remarking that “ill-defined social definitions of consent” are also “very much” applicable to memecoins. 

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Implications for Web3 

The MetaMask co-founder’s findings point to better infrastructure and tools to address the issues surrounding consent, user expectation and investor perspective.

He clarified that the memecoin ecosystem needs better “tools and incentives,” which could “make things much more interesting, fun and useful and actually improve the vibes.”

Finlay advocates for a system allowing token issuers “fine-grained control over their tokens,” including restricting markets to specific communities or offering structured sale methods.

With AI and blockchain technologies continuing to meld with memecoins, the MetaMask co-founder’s experiment calls for systems that build trust, respect user expectations and improve consent transparency.

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