What's Metamask? Who's the company that's building it, and can they be trusted?
At first lets talk about its platform called Metamask learn.
Metamask Learn is an educational platform that helps you understand what web three is, what makes it so interesting, and how to use some of the tools in the space, especially their self custody wallet. Metamask well, in the style of Metamask, this platform is sleek and clean, and it provides an interactive and simulated environment that will help onboard people new to self custody safely using Metamask. The purpose of this platform is to guide new users through the most common topics to help them learn about web three topics like crypto wallets, nfts, and DAOs.
Since some recent events in the crypto space, people are becoming more and more aware that they can't trust their crypto to big centralized exchanges like FTX, Voyager and Celsius. Due to this, it's more important than ever to learn how to actually control your own crypto. Hold it for yourself so that nobody else has control of it. Metamask learn seems to be addressing this problem here.
Then lets get to the question ,can the be trusted?
Its an open source self custody wallet for Ethereum and Ethereum like blockchains that can be used as an extension to a web browser or as a mobile app. Open source is a term that means code is publicly accessible and viewable by anyone. Now being open source doesn't automatically mean there's not malicious code, but it usually means that it is open to the community and that there have been a ton of other eyes on the code. And if there was malicious code, someone would have probably already found it. Next I said that Metamask is a self custody wallet. A wallet is a term in the cryptocurrency world that simply means it's software designed to be able to hold your crypto and let you make transactions on your behalf. Technically, what the software is holding is the private keys needed to sign transactions for your crypto.
Metamask itself can actually hold hundreds of different accounts within it, not just a single account. And you can move your accounts from one device to another, but you'll have to move the private key as well. The self custody part simply means that you and only you are the only person with the power to move your crypto. This is very different from when you give your cryptos to someplace like Coinbase or binance where they hold it for you. This is actually a great place to say that you can learn more about what self custody is and how it works within Metamask.
Metamask is most often used as a browser extension for transactions. This means that it's specifically a tool that adds onto your web browser, whether that be chrome, brave, Firefox or edge. Metamask is local to your computer only and they don't save any information to the cloud. This is a big deal and it's pretty important. And what it means is that your metamask can only get hacked if someone gets access to the computer that you have it installed on, not some server that's halfway across the world.
Metamask only stores your keys on your computer. This means if you want to move your wallet from your desktop to your laptop, the only way to do it is to copy and paste and move your private keys over. There's also a phone application you can use for mobile transactions. Finally, Metamask follows the ERC standard, which basically means it currently only works on blockchains that use Ethereum technology. This of course means Ethereum, but also chains like polygon, avalanche, Binance, smart chain and many other flavors of Ethereum.
This also means that Metamask doesnt currently work with popular non EVM chains like Bitcoin, Solana or Cardano. But who is behind Metamask? Who organized the creation of Metamask? Well, that would be Consensys.
Consensys is the parent company behind Metamask. Consensys is a global software company that specifically focuses on blockchain technology. Even more so, up until now, they've mostly focused on EVM chains like Ethereum, Polygon or Binance. But they've recently announced their integration with non EVM compatible blockchains with some of their newer products. And it should be noted that Consensys was founded by Joseph Lubin, who is also the co founder of Ethereum.
In March of 2022, the company was valued at over $7 billion. The interesting thing about Consensys is that they work to build infrastructure, products and services for the Ethereum ecosystem and other web three decentralized technologies. Their two flagship products are Metamask and Infura. Metamask, as we already talked about, is the world's leading self custody. Web three wallet and Infura is a developer platform to help scale and enable developers to build out new blockchain enabled apps.
that all from me today.I really hope you learned something.