MetaMask, ConsenSys’ leading mobile app and browser extension wallet, celebrates its 6th anniversary. MetaMask has achieved 6 digit growth in Monthly Active Users (MAUs) since its inception. The exponential growth of the last two years can be attributed to the frenzy of interest in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps, NFT marketplaces, play-to-earn games, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and metaverse worlds.
For the first time, MetaMask has chosen to mark this occasion by sharing exclusive insights around its origin story, MetaMask’s top and fastest growing markets, and some of the most popular use cases in these regions. Given the current market volatility, MetaMask also provides unique insights on what developers are currently building and the changes that they foresee across the Web3 landscape.
2022: MetaMask’s Top and Fastest Growing Markets
At the end of the first quarter of 2022, MetaMask’s top 25 markets in the world in terms of Monthly Active Users using the mobile version included:
10 markets have been growing the fastest during this same period:
DeFi, NFTs and gaming currently represent the top sources of activity for MetaMask users on Mobile, with interesting trends in some markets:
Growing economic activity in Web3 has attracted a number of highly innovative applications but also drawn the attention of online scammers and thieves. As a leader in terms of best practices, MetaMask announced in May 2022 a strategic partnership with Asset Reality to help victims of scams recover their digital assets where possible.
The current bear market has moderately impacted MetaMask monthly active users thus far. Whilst MetaMask is observing more irregular cycles, it is still seeing sustained use. Even though the overall macro market significantly impacts crypto users’ focus on financial use cases, there are a high volume of individuals using MetaMask for commercial, social, and cultural activities.
The Future: Looking Beyond the Bear Market
Around 600 unique developers have started to interact with Snaps since its launch in January 2022.
Some of the snaps that have launched since then:
- Filecoin Snap (by Protocol Labs and Chainsafe): Enables the Filecoin network inside MetaMask, providing dapps with easier integration. Once installed, the snap will add a Filecoin integration to the wallet with an accompanying frontend. Here, users can view their Filecoin accounts and balances, send FIL transactions, and create cryptographically signed messages with their Filecoin keys.
- Bitcoin Snap (by Keystone): This snap lets you manage your own bitcoin directly in MetaMask.
- ArSnap (by Pianity): Extends MetaMask’s capabilities to support Arweave. For dapp developers, it’s aimed at empowering them to create their own integration using ArSnap Adapter. This defines ArSnap’s API and makes it accessible to dApps developers through an easy-to-use and clean API.
- StarkNet Snap (by ConsenSys/Starkware): The StarkNet snap allows developers to deploy StarkNet accounts, make transactions on StarkNet, and interact with StarkNet smart contracts.
How MetaMask Snaps is changing the landscape:
- Allows developers to create permissionless experiences to extend the capabilities of their dapp and MetaMask. In other words, they can build on top of MetaMask without needing support from the MetaMask team.
- We are seeing Snaps being created for a multi-chain industry: Snaps for non-EMV-compatible networks now allow integration with MetaMask, which was initially built for EVM-compatible networks.
- The innovation of Snaps is that developers can build features and integrations beyond what is being imagined today. We expect more use cases to be created as the product gains more awareness across the developer community.
For more detail on the MetaMask origin story, read the full chronology of its ascent to the world’s most popular web3 wallet and browser.