Consensys Software Inc. announced on September 9 that it will split into two independent companies before the end of 2026. The existing corporate entity will rebrand as MetaMask, focusing entirely on consumer self-custodial finance under Joe Lubin as Chairman and CEO. The protocols and institutional infrastructure business, including Linea and the Besu Ethereum client, will become a newly formed company that carries the Consensys name forward, led by Mike Kriak as CEO and David Cunningham as President, with Lubin serving as Executive Chairman.
Today, MetaMask begins its next chapter as an independent company.
— MetaMask 🦊 (@MetaMask) September 9, 2026
Consensys Software Inc., the company behind MetaMask, is rebranding as MetaMask, fully focused on the consumer platform. The protocols and institutional infrastructure businesses, including Linea, are becoming a…
Lubin described the separation as a recognition that each market has outgrown a shared operating structure.
"For over a decade, the Consensys teams and products that ultimately became Consensys Software Inc. helped build the foundations of the Ethereum ecosystem," he said on X. "MetaMask grew out of that work into the world's most widely used self-custodial wallet, and today it's becoming something larger: a platform where people don't just hold their assets, but manage their money in its many diverse forms and aspects."
What each company inherits from the split
MetaMask takes the consumer platform with more than 100 million downloads across approximately 190 countries and trillions of dollars in cumulative transaction volume. Its recent launch of Money Account, a self-custodial account combining automated earning, instant spending, and trading in a single balance, signals the direction the standalone company intends to pursue. Lubin described stepping into the CEO role full-time as recognition that "consumer finance deserves the same focus and ambition that we've brought to building Ethereum itself."
The new Consensys inherits Linea, the Ethereum layer-2 network, the Besu Ethereum execution layer client that underpins many financial institutions' private EVM networks, and the Teku consensus client. David Cunningham, who becomes President of the new entity, described the institutional opportunity directly.
"Financial institutions and market infrastructure are moving to always-on operations with tokenization at the core," Cunningham said. "Consensys Software Inc. has built the open-source technology that is the foundation of this transition."
Why the split happened at this specific moment
Consensys Software Inc. was founded in 2014 by Joe Lubin, who co-founded Ethereum alongside Vitalik Buterin and others. The company began as an incubator for Ethereum-based projects and grew into a sprawling organization spanning developer tools, infrastructure, enterprise blockchain, and consumer products. MetaMask itself launched in 2016 as a browser extension that allowed users to interact with Ethereum applications without running a full node. It became the dominant gateway to Ethereum DeFi and NFT markets during the 2020 to 2022 cycle, when its monthly active user count grew from approximately 1 million to over 30 million. The 100 million downloads figure cited in the announcement reflects cumulative installations rather than active users, but the scale reflects MetaMask's position as the entry point for a large portion of the global crypto user base.
Consensys has faced financial pressure in recent years. The company conducted significant layoffs in 2023, reducing its headcount by approximately 11% after the broader crypto market downturn compressed MetaMask's transaction fee revenue, which had peaked during the NFT and DeFi boom of 2021 and 2022. A 2024 funding round valued the company at a reduced figure compared with its 2022 peak valuation of $7 billion. The decision to split into two focused entities may also reflect a need to attract separate investor bases, with consumer fintech investors better suited to MetaMask's growth profile and enterprise blockchain investors better suited to the institutional Consensys business.
The institutional market the new Consensys targets
Citi published a report in June 2026 titled "Tokenization 2030" estimating that tokenized assets could reach between $5.5 trillion and $8.2 trillion by 2030. That projection sits at the center of why the institutional business warranted a dedicated company structure. Besu's position as the underlying execution client for many banks' private blockchain networks gives the new Consensys a specific technical foothold that no other Ethereum-adjacent company holds at the same depth across systemically important financial institutions.
Besu is an open-source Ethereum client developed under the Hyperledger umbrella at the Linux Foundation. Its design made it particularly suitable for enterprise permissioned networks because it supports privacy extensions, permissioning schemes, and consensus algorithms that public Ethereum does not require. JPMorgan's Quorum network, which later became the basis for the enterprise blockchain work that multiple large banks have built on, shares technical lineage with the Ethereum codebase that Besu implements. The new Consensys's institutional positioning builds on that decade of enterprise Ethereum work rather than starting from a general-purpose blockchain sales motion.
MetaMask and the new Consensys will operate independently after the separation, expected to complete before the end of 2026. Both will continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem, though through different customer bases and product mandates.
Matvii Diadkov
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