MetaMask Review: Still the Default, No Longer the Best

MetaMask's compatibility is a public good. If a decentralised application works with one wallet, it works with this one, and integration engineers test against it first. That advantage is real, and it is now doing a lot of load-bearing work for a product that competitors have overtaken on almost every other axis.

Fees

The built-in swap adds a service fee on top of the route it selects. Across the pairs we tested, executing the same trade through an aggregator directly was consistently cheaper. For a wallet whose primary audience is people who transact frequently, that gap compounds.

Safety of defaults

Transaction previews have improved but still under-communicate the consequences of a token approval, which remains the mechanism behind a large share of retail losses. Rival wallets now flag unlimited allowances and known-malicious contracts more assertively by default.

A wallet's most important feature is the sentence it shows you immediately before you lose your money.

Clutter

Successive additions — portfolio, staking, bridges, card, notifications — have made the extension slower and busier than the tool that won the market. Power users can navigate it. New users hesitate, and hesitation is where phishing lives.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5

Keep it installed for compatibility, pair it with a hardware wallet for anything of size, and do your swapping elsewhere. It is no longer the wallet we would recommend to someone starting today.

Tested for four weeks on Chrome, Firefox, iOS and Android.