MetaMask Enhancements

MetaMask, the popular self-custodial crypto wallet for the Ethereum (ETH) network, shared a flurry of announcements on Thursday, aimed at improving its wallet’s user experience.

Part of MetaMask’s revamped roadmap includes adding smart contract capabilities to its current wallet. At the moment, MetaMask is an Externally Owned Account (EOA), a type of wallet that is controlled by a public and private key. One of the main downfalls with EOAs is that they are subject to human error; forgetting your private key means losing access to your crypto holdings forever. The other type of wallet on Ethereum is Contract Accounts (CAs), which are controlled by code and feature recovery mechanisms and security checks for verifying transactions.

In a blog post during ETHDenver, the largest North American Ethereum conference, the MetaMask team said: “Smart-contract-based accounts allow us to solve a number of problems: enabling powerful uses of the assets you hold while improving security. When users define terms from their own programmable account, we expand how they express agency enforced by their own code.”

One new feature aimed at enhancing the user experience on MetaMask is ERC-5792, which builds on the existing smart transactions feature. Under ERC-5792, known as batched transactions, users can combine transaction steps, such as “approve + swap” in one click, saving time and gas fees by batching those steps together.

Dan Finlay, the co-founder of MetaMask, told CoinDesk that batching transactions “gives us all the things you’re going to ask for in order. We’ll present them to the user in a unified way, allowing them to pay one gas fee for the entire series of operations.”

MetaMask Card

The MetaMask team also announced that its MetaMask debit card will be available in select states in the U.S. starting mid-March. The card has been in production for a few months and was previously available only to users in the UK and EU.

It connects to a user’s MetaMask wallet, enabling them to spend their crypto. “You can earn staking rewards or yield on your favorite protocol with your favorite tokens and have those funds available to spend anywhere that Mastercard is accepted with just a tap,” the team wrote in a blog post.

More Support

To further enhance user experience, the MetaMask team will also add support for Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL) in its wallets, allowing users to hold various crypto assets in one place.

“So, these updates deliver some of the most popular blockchains while ensuring we have smoothed out every part of our interface for seamless integration of new blockchains,” Finlay said in the interview.