Ethereum’s most popular browser wallet is bending the knee to King BTC.
Per a Consensys job posting, the MetaMask team is searching for a product manager to oversee a Bitcoin integration for the wallet. MetaMask, which is owned by Ethereum incubation company Consensys, rose to pre-eminence in the DeFi summer of 2020 as the go-to wallet to store Ethereum tokens and interoperate with DeFi exchanges like Uniswap. It is arguably the most popular Ethereum wallet available with a self-reported 30 million monthly active userbase.
At one point in the not-so-distant past, it would have been laughable to suggest that the wallet would integrate Bitcoin. Well, goodbye to all that.
“MetaMask is expanding beyond Ethereum,” the job posting reads. “You will be responsible for the end-to-end Bitcoin experience: onboarding users to Bitcoin accounts (SegWit, Taproot, etc), supporting different types of transactions, enabling dapps to connect to MetaMask, and connecting with hardware wallets.”
The posting continues to say that experience working with “Bitcoin wallets and dapps … [the] Lightning network, runes, ordinals, BRC-20s, layer-2 networks like Stacks, Rootstock, and Spiderchain” would be a bonus.
As this last tidbit indicates, MetaMask is hoping to tap into Bitcoin’s own budding DeFi ecosystem – what we (and others) call Bitcoin Season 2. MetaMask’s Bitcoin aspirations come more than a year after Phantom, a MetaMask-esque wallet for the Solana ecosystem which also supports Ethereum, rolled out Bitcoin and ordinals support.
Depending on your vantage point, MetaMask’s embrace of Bitcoin is either a leading or a lagging indicator that the primogenitor blockchain is the center of gravity for the next generation of on-chain financial products. Ethereum’s price gains have significantly lagged behind both Bitcoin and Solana so far this cycle, and MetaMask swap volumes are much lower than their peak in 2021. So perhaps the wallet’s impending integration of Bitcoin is a bid for relevance.