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.

Smart Contract Capabilities

One part of MetaMask’s revamped roadmap includes adding smart contract capabilities to its current wallet. Currently, MetaMask is an Externally Owned Account (EOA), which uses a public and private key. A significant drawback of EOAs is human error; forgetting a private key means losing access to crypto holdings. In contrast, Contract Accounts (CAs) are controlled by code, offering recovery mechanisms and security checks for verifying transactions.

In a blog post during ETHDenver, North America’s largest Ethereum conference, the MetaMask team stated, “smart-contract-based accounts allow us to solve a number of problems: allowing new powerful uses of the assets you hold, while simultaneously improving security. When the user defines their terms from their own programmable account, we greatly expand how the user expresses their agency in ways that are enforced by their own code.”

ERC-5792 Feature

One user-friendly feature is ERC-5792, which builds on the current smart transactions feature. This allows users to combine transaction steps, like “approve + swap” in one click, saving time and gas fees. Dan Finlay, co-founder of MetaMask, noted 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 nice, unified way. The user will pay for one gas fee for the series of events, and then it’ll just be one block for the whole series of operations.”

MetaMask Debit Card

The MetaMask team announced that its debit card will be available in select U.S. states starting mid-March. Initially accessible to users in the UK and EU, this card connects to a MetaMask wallet, enabling crypto spending.

“You can be earning 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.

Expanded Support

To enhance user experience, MetaMask will also add support for Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL) in its wallets. This allows users to hold diverse crypto assets in one place.

Finlay remarked, “So these are simultaneously delivering some of the most popular blockchains, but also ensuring that we have smoothed out every part of our interface that allows new blockchains to be added seamlessly.”