If you’re familiar with decentralised finance (DeFi), you probably know what MetaMask is. But if you don’t, it’s good to know that it is one of the most successful applications in bringing Ethereum and so-called ‘Web3’ closer to mainstream adoption.
MetaMask is used by over 250,000 monthly active users, processing around 1.5m transactions within the same period. Rather than being used as an everyday hot wallet to make payments with or trade from, MetaMask is mostly used to interact with decentralised apps (dApps) and smart contracts in regular browsers.
So what is MetaMask exactly?
MetaMask is an Ethereum wallet and a browser extension that can be used on Chrome, Firefox, and Brave browsers. It basically works as a bridge between the Ethereum blockchain and regular browsers and serves as an interface for Ethereum-based dApps. …
Crypto trends come and go more times than China has changed its stance on blockchain. DeFi is now the most recent popular trend, but is it going to amount to anything useful? We think so.
We’ve seen many flavours of the month in the past, going back to the early days of the Bitcoin forks, where a whole batch of new coins forking from BTC calling themselves the new bitcoin — trying to take away momentum from the original Bitcoin. …
In a recent interview with Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum blockchain, he was asked what he thought about the almost explosive rise of decentralised finance, (DeFi). He answered that it makes sense that the first real application of blockchain technology is around finance and that he is happy to see DeFi expand beyond trading, transactions, and payments, to include insurance, smart contracts, lending and so forth.
Finance is a logical first area of activity for blockchain to disrupt because, as Vitalik points out, it is where centralised structures are “the most terrible”. Sending an email from one country to another is trivial, but sending money across borders still takes a tremendous amount of effort, whereas with blockchain technology such transactions can be almost instantaneous and at low cost. …
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