MetaMask Posts Torrid Growth As Users Flock to Ethereum

Metamask has broken 10 million monthly active users, according to the blockchain infrastructure company ConsenSys.

Metamask is the leading Ethereum wallet, working both in browsers and on mobile devices. It allows users to hold cryptocurrencies on Ethereum and compatible blockchains such as Polygon. Metamask also enables users to interact with Web3 applications that use crypto wallets as a form of identity.

“We’ve been pretty consistently seeing wave upon wave of growth, over 30% MoM along with more and more diverse use cases,” Jacob Cantele from Metamask’s operations team told The Defiant. “Most recently we’ve seen a huge explosion of gaming use cases, with five of our 10 most popular sites in MetaMask being games.”

Bellwether

Launched in 2016, Metamask reports that it has 19 times more users today than it had in July 2020. Metamask’s growth can be considered a bellwether for the whole Ethereum community, because generally it is considered to be the first wallet most new users try.

Metamask’s user count is in marked contrast to other estimates of the size of the total Ethereum population, a tricky proposition. Most sophisticated users have multiple wallets, and those wallets are not tied to names or emails so it’s all but impossible to know which ones might belong to the same person.

Metamask has also been specifically designed for Web3, so it’s measuring activities that other methods might not. “Our Monthly Active Users metric is a client-side metric that doesn’t necessarily involve a transaction. Many of our users are long-term holders who log in to MetaMask to check their balances. More recently with the gaming boom, we’ve seen a massive number of users using MetaMask for EIP-712 signatures to sign in to games, DAOs, etc,” Cantele explained.

Crypto research organization The Block estimates about 400,000 active addresses, while BitInfoCharts puts it closer to 800,000.

These estimates use different methodologies. Metamask’s numbers would also include users on blockchains connected to Ethereum, such as Arbitrum, in addition to those on the main chain. In fact Cantele made a particular point about other chains, saying that “most of our transactions are happening on custom networks, rather than on the Ethereum Mainnet.”

Applications

Ethereum is a security layer for a complex system of related blockchains.

Etherscan reports 150 million unique Ethereum addresses, but many of these are likely wallets that were only used once, like long dormant Twitter accounts.

“MetaMask defined a new kind of cryptocurrency wallet, where users don’t just interact with currencies, but with decentralized applications,” said Dan Finlay, MetaMask’s co-founder said in a press release. “We are constantly making these new kinds of applications more safe and accessible to a broader audience.”