MetaMask Little Fox Wallet opens up fiat currency transactions, but the total cost of various handling fees is as high as 9%

By Zen, PANews

With 30 million monthly active users, the Little Fox Wallet (MetaMask) supports users to directly sell cryptocurrencies into legal currency to bank cards.

On the evening of September 5, the encrypted wallet MetaMask announced the launch of the latest feature "Sell", which allows users to exchange cryptocurrencies into legal currencies (such as US dollars, euros, British pounds) through MetaMask Portfolio, and send funds to bank accounts. This function is currently only available in the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe. At the beginning of its launch, it only supports ETH on the Ethereum mainnet, and plans to expand to native gas tokens on the Layer2 network in the short term.

The sale feature comes about five months after MetaMask launched a feature that allowed users to buy cryptocurrencies using fiat currency from bank accounts, PayPal, debit and credit cards.

According to the official introduction, users must select their region when using this function for the first time. If they use it again later, this step will be skipped and the last selected region will be used by default. Then enter the amount of cryptocurrency such as ETH to be sold, select an offer from multiple service providers, and connect a bank account. MetaMask has established partnerships with cryptocurrency entrance providers such as MoonPay, Sardine, and Transak, but currently only MoonPay and Transak provide services for the "Sell" function. When new users use these service providers, some may need to complete KYC verification on their websites first.

Due to regional policy restrictions, Asian users are temporarily unable to use this feature. We can learn more about the details of this withdrawal service based on testing by Twitter user @S4mmyEth.

British user @S4mmyEth initiated a withdrawal application for 0.05ETH on the "Sell" service, and he chose MoonPay as the service provider. After the on-chain transaction was processed, the relevant fees were transferred to MoonPay. In the process, 0.05 ETH with a current price of approximately US$82.78 generated a gas fee of US$0.80 and an on-chain exchange fee of 1%. From submitting the application to receiving the legal currency, the whole process takes 5 minutes.

After all the operations, @S4mmyEth ended up receiving £59.42, and the instant price of 0.05 ETH when he initiated the withdrawal was about £65, so it took a total of nearly £6 to convert it to fiat currency, the total rate About 9%. Among them, the ETH gas fee is 0.65 pounds (0.80 US dollars), the exchange transaction fee is 1% (0.65 pounds), and the remaining hidden fee of about 4.50 pounds may be charged by MoonPay.

This also means that from MetaMask’s sale of tokens to bank cards, various handling fee costs total up to 9%, which is indeed higher than expected.

The friendliness of traditional financial institutions towards the crypto market has significantly decreased since the FTX thunderstorm in November last year. After the crypto-friendly bank thunderstorm this year, the exchange channel between the crypto market and legal currency has been narrowed. MetaMask is working hard to reopen this channel. Although users who cooperate with other intermediaries have to pay friction costs, it has simplified the operation process and is more conducive to the entry of more users from outside the circle.

In December last year, MetaMask reached a partnership with PayPal to allow some US users to purchase Ethereum through PayPal. Then in May of this year, this cooperation was extended to all US users (except Hawaii), making it the first Web3 wallet to enable such transactions through PayPal. In addition to purchasing ETH directly, the integration also supports transferring ETH from PayPal to MetaMask to help more users host ETH themselves.

Previously in April, MetaMask launched a "Buy" cryptocurrency purchase service for more than 90 tokens to users in more than 189 countries. Users can use this function to purchase more than 75 tokens on 8 blockchains in multiple countries. Buy supports a wider range of payment methods as it accepts debit and credit card transfers, PayPal transfers, bank transfers, instant ACH transfers and other transfer methods.

In addition to the access to legal currency, perhaps due to the fierce competition in the wallet track, MetaMask has changed from its previous Buddhist attitude and has continued to update its products in the past year.

For example, the stake pledge service is launched, and users can directly pledge tokens such as ETH to obtain income. Integrates with cross-chain bridge providers, including bridge aggregators and individual bridges. What’s more worth mentioning is the “MetaMask Snap” system it launched to safely extend MetaMask’s functionality. It functions much like the Apple App Store for crypto wallets, allowing third-party developers to launch new decentralized applications to expand MetaMask’s functionality. , creating a permissionless ecosystem.

As one of the most widely used applications in the encryption market, MetaMask’s every move has attracted market attention. Compared with other wallets that constantly roll out products and user experience, the little fox’s road to becoming the king of rolls may have just begun.