The popular Ethereum wallet MetaMask has hit another milestone in terms of active monthly active users while the company behind it has raised millions in funding in funding.
In an announcement on November 17, ConsenSys, the company that develops MetaMask, revealed some landmark figures for the world’s most popular Ethereum wallet.
MetaMask now has around 21 million monthly active users which is an increase of 38 times from 2020 figures. The crypto wallet interacts with an ecosystem of around 3,700 unique Web3 applications, he added.
MetaMask’s swap feature has enabled more than $10 billion USD in peer-to-peer token swapping but has been criticized for high fees. The wallet uses dynamic service fees that range between 0.3% and 0.875% per transaction, adding gas fees that can make Ethereum Layer 1 transactions expensive.
To save on the fee payment pain, MetaMask also supports a range of layer 2 networks such as Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, BSC, Celo, Avalanche, and NEAR.
The wallet also has a MetaMask institutional version that integrates custody and compliance solutions allowing organizations and institutions to engage in DeFi.
ConsenSys raises $200M
In the same announcement, ConsenSys reported the close of a $200 million financing round, bringing its valuation to $3.2 billion. The round follows the $ 65 million the company raised in April from funders such as JPMorgan, Mastercard and UBS.
New investors to the round were Marshall Wace, Third Point, ParaFi Capital, and Think Investments. It also included the participation of HSBC, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Spartan Group, DeFiance Capital and Animoca Brands.
Founder and CEO of New York-based ConsenSys and co-creator of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, commented the paradigm shift to a world running on decentralized protocols is in full gear, before adding:
As our technology spreads into the mainstream, we are already seeing a transformation in the way growing cohorts of builders, users, artists, and businesses live and work.
Massive developer base
The company’s developer tools and infrastructure are powered by Infura, which is used by 350,000 developers including MetaMask and leading DeFi and NFT platforms.
ConsenSys also integrates its other products with Infura, such as Truffle, which has 4.7 million developers working on writing, testing and securing smart contracts.
The firm has its own enterprise blockchain solution called Quorum which is already in use by ten different central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects, it stated.
In August, Lubin commented that Ethereum in the future would be “orders of magnitude” larger than Bitcoin running on a decentralized Web 3.
