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The MetaMask team is allegedly not getting the support it needs from its parent company ConsenSys, a Redditor claims.
A contributor of major Ethereum browser extension Metamask has reported that the MetaMask team is âtotally overwhelmedâ and not being prioritized by its parent company ConsenSys.
In a Dec. 25 Reddit post, Reddit user lazaridiscom3 alleges that the MetaMask team is not getting the support it needs from ConsenSys, and, consequently, the whole team of 24 employees is overwhelmed.
Redditor says the Ethereumâs âcritical value-moving pieceâ isnât decentralized
The post, titled âHelp MetaMask out of its Activity-Trap,â goes on to say that the MetaMask team has a number of unsolved issues and its inner workflow structure is neither transparent nor decentralized. The post reads:
âOne cannot follow development via the public issue-tracker, simply because the team uses an internal tracker and internal âmeetings.â This is not transparent. This is not decentralized. MetaMask is a critical value-moving piece of Ethereum. It is written in JavaScript, nearly completely untyped. The code is of low quality, full of technical debt (both, in terms of code and architecture).â
User Lazardiscom â who goes by Lazardis â told Cointelegraph that he is participating in the project as a contributor, citing his Lazardiscom account on GitHub. As part of suggested solutions to existing problems, the contributor urged that the MetaMask team needs to fully migrate over TypeScript immediately.
Lazardis further suggested that ConsenSys needs to implement âstricter evaluation of its âSpokes,â a strict and binding set of rules for public projects.â The developer also argued that ConsenSysâ software project â referred to as Gitcoin â âneeds to be far more uncontrolled, and needs to become attractive.â
MetaMask team allegedly has hierarchical structure despite Lubinâs claims
In the post, Lazardis specifically criticized the structural issues in the MetaMask team. According to the post, MetaMask actually maintains team leads despite Joe Lubin, ConsenSys founder and co-founder of Ethereum, trying to âconvince everyoneâ that ConsenSys is a non-hierarchical company.
Specifically, the post mentions MetaMaskâs employee Daniel Finlay as one of the leads who is âtotally overwhelmed.â According to Finlayâs LinkedIn page, he currently serves as lead developer on MetaMask at ConsenSys, with his primary responsibilities focused on the browser extension. Cointelegraph contacted Finlay regarding the issue and had yet to receive a response upon initial publication, but received a response on Dec. 26 which has been included at the end of this article.
Additionally, the post also mentions âsuper-low bounties,â noting that some of those bounties equate to less than $1 per hour, after calculating how much time the tasks take.
In October, Lubin announced a goal to grow the number of developers on the Ethereum blockchain to as many as one million in 2020. Dubbed OneMillionDevs.com, the initiative was announced by Lubin at a major Ethereum-focused conference Devcon in October 2019. According to Lubin, there are 30 million software developers worldwide, while only a few tens of thousands are blockchain developers, the majority of whom are involved in Ethereum.
Meanwhile, another Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has recently triggered a wave of argument over decentralization in crypto on Twitter. Previously, Buterin argued that centralized crypto exchanges are poised to âburn in hell.â
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Update Dec. 27Â
Finlayâs response: âI want to firmly reject the general thesis of alarm. Weâre doing alright!â
Finlay responded to Cointelegraphâs request for comment by linking to his Reddit post from Dec. 26, which staunchly rejects Lazardisâ negativity. Finlay further said that Lazardis was guilty of âborderline representing himself as a MetaMask team memberâ when he is simply a contributor. As a result of these concerns, Finlay plans to block Lazardis from their GitHub organization. According to Finlay, the recent Reddit post by Lazardis feels like a âvery frustrated job application,â while his âoverall inflammatory and alarmist toneâ forces the MetaMask team to not work with him anymore.
While admitting that a number of insights provided by Lazardis are fair, including one specific bounty and the urgency to migrate to TypeScript, Finlay still firmly rejected the general idea of alarm, emphasizing that the team is seeing solid progress. As such, the lead developer stressed that both ConsenSys and Lubin continue to contribute to the project. Finlay wrote:
âWe love what we do, and ConsenSys is letting us continue doing it! Honestly, weâre incredibly grateful to ConsenSys and Joe for continuing to make ecosystem-enabling tools like MetaMask, Truffle, Infura, GitCoin, Bounties Network, and many more possible.â
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Update 03:45 PM UTC: This article was updated to specify Finlayâs counterclaim to Lazardis published on Reddit on Dec. 26.
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