Consensys Software, the company behind the MetaMask wallet, will split into two independent companies by the end of 2026, separating its consumer wallet business from its institutional blockchain infrastructure work. The existing legal entity will rebrand as MetaMask under Joe Lubin, while a newly formed company keeps the Consensys name and takes the protocol and institutional businesses.
The announcement came on September 9 after weeks of speculation. Lubin, an Ethereum co-founder who has run Consensys for more than a decade, becomes chairman and CEO of MetaMask and stays on as executive chairman of the new Consensys. Mike Kriak takes the CEO seat at the new Consensys, with David Cunningham as president. Both companies will operate independently once the corporate separation closes, expected before the end of the year.
Two markets, two companies
The split reflects how far apart the two businesses have drifted. MetaMask is a consumer product with more than 100 million downloads across roughly 190 countries and trillions of dollars in cumulative transaction volume. It has pushed well beyond wallet basics this year. The team launched a US Mastercard payment card with rewards paid in mUSD, then added a Money Account yielding up to 4 percent APY. Lubin has described the wallet as something closer to a crypto-native neobank than a browser extension, and the product roadmap has followed that logic with payments, savings and investing features landing in sequence.
The new Consensys, by contrast, sells infrastructure to institutions. It keeps Linea, the Ethereum layer 2 network, along with the Besu execution client and the Teku consensus client. Management says demand for tokenization and stablecoin rails has moved banks and financial firms from pilot projects into real deployments, and that this work needs dedicated leadership, a separate operating model and its own investment strategy. Institutional buyers, the argument goes, want a vendor focused on their compliance and integration needs, not one that also chases consumer app-store rankings.
Lubin framed the move as a question of focus. In the official statement he said MetaMask has grown into a platform where people manage their money in many forms, and that consumer finance deserves the same attention the team brought to building Ethereum itself. He also said the new Consensys remains a protocols company building the infrastructure behind the next generation of institutional finance.
IPO questions left open
The announcement said nothing about a public listing, and that omission drew immediate attention. Consensys raised $450 million in 2022 at a valuation above $7 billion, with investors including Microsoft, SoftBank and Google. It said in 2024 that it planned to go public in early 2026, then paused those preparations in May without offering a new timeline. Lubin declined to comment on listing plans this week.
Analysts noted that spinning MetaMask out could give the wallet its own path to an offering, though the company has not confirmed anything. A possible MetaMask token, floated by Lubin for years, also went unmentioned in the release. Fortune and CoinDesk both flagged the silence on these points, and commentary sites have already started speculating about a 2027 window. For now that remains a hypothesis, not an announced project. Anyone expecting a token airdrop from the split has nothing official to point to, and the company has been careful not to hint at one.
What it means for users
For users, the company says nothing changes in the short term. Keys and funds stay in the self-custodial wallet, which now supports Bitcoin alongside Ethereum and a range of other networks. The MetaMask brand moves to the existing corporate shell, so there is no migration for account holders. Seed phrases, imported accounts and connected dapps all carry over untouched because the application itself does not change hands in any technical sense.
Developers building on Linea or the Besu client will see the same software continue under the new Consensys entity. The main practical question for institutions is continuity of support contracts and roadmap commitments. Neither company has published a service-by-service transition schedule. Businesses that depend on Consensys infrastructure will be watching for those details as the separation proceeds through the fourth quarter, and any gaps in that handover would land on integration teams with little warning.
A decade in the making
Consensys started in Brooklyn more than ten years ago as an incubator for Ethereum projects and grew into one of the ecosystem’s core software companies. It survived the 2018 and 2022 downturns, fought a long legal battle with the SEC over MetaMask that regulators eventually dropped, and moved its headquarters to Texas in 2023. The paused IPO in 2024 and the split now bookend a stretch in which the company both expanded and retrenched.
The move is the clearest sign yet that management sees consumer crypto and institutional infrastructure as businesses that no longer belong under one roof. Self-custody has become a mass-market product category, while banks are moving from experiments to production systems. Running both from one office made coordination easier but diluted attention on each side of the house.
Whether two focused companies outperform one sprawling one is the bet Lubin is now making with the firm he founded. The consumer side gets a leader who has been evangelizing self-custody since MetaMask had a few thousand users. The institutional side gets managers whose background is enterprise software delivery. If the split works, each business can hire, price and invest for its own market. If it does not, the industry will read it as proof that even the most established Ethereum companies struggle to serve two masters at once.