Consensys said on 9 September it will split into two independent companies by the end of the year. MetaMask, the crypto wallet more than 100 million people have downloaded, becomes its own consumer business. What remains, including the Linea blockchain and Consensys’s institutional Ethereum infrastructure, keeps the Consensys name under separate leadership. Joe Lubin, the Ethereum co-founder who has run Consensys since 2014, stays on as chairman and chief executive of MetaMask, and also becomes executive chairman of the new Consensys.
Lubin’s dual role undercuts the word independent. The stated logic is that a consumer wallet and a protocol infrastructure business now pull in different directions, MetaMask toward payments and tokenised assets, Consensys toward institutional Ethereum tooling for banks. Both entities report, in effect, to the same person through the transition, a normal way to manage a carve out and a reason to wait before calling the two fully separate.
The questions investors have been asking about Consensys remain open. Lubin declined to give a renewed IPO timeline when asked directly, though CoinDesk and The Block both describe an early 2027 listing as the working assumption, without an official date attached. A MetaMask token, speculated about for years, went unaddressed too. Consensys was last valued at 7 billion dollars in a 2022 round, set in a very different market, and no new figure came with Wednesday’s news.
MetaMask says the split changes nothing for existing users, their assets, keys and access stay as they are. What it changes is who MetaMask answers to once the paperwork is done, and whether that delivers the listing and the token markets have waited for, or just a wallet reporting to a chairman instead of a parent company, is not something this week’s statement resolved.
