Decentralized Finance Portfolio (DeFi) and Browser Extension MetaMask has partnered with three crypto-focused custodians as part of a broader effort to attract more institutional capital into the digital asset market.
On Tuesday, the company announced new partnerships with BitGo, Qredo and Cactus Custody centered around the MetaMask Institutional — a new product offering that gives institutional investors access to large amounts of collateral in the DeFi market.
ConsenSys, the Ethereum developer behind MetaMask, introduced the MetaMask Institutional in May. When the spokesperson was asked how the MetaMask Institutional works in tandem with the product’s existing functionality, he told Cointelegraph:
“Institutional MetaMask provides the same functionality and features as MetaMask – that is, connectivity to a decentralized financial (DeFi) ecosystem spanning 10,000 trading, risk-taking, lending and borrowing spaces across all EVM-compliant (Ethereum Virtual Machine) chains.”
The biggest difference between the MetaMask Institutional and the company’s main browser and wallet extension is how the private keys are stored. The spokesperson explained:
Within MetaMask, the keys are stored in the extension (unless a hardware wallet is paired with the MetaMask). [MetaMask Institutional] He built the SDK (Software Development Kit) and API (Application Programming Interface) that communicate with qualified custodians and save technology stacks. This provides organizations with unparalleled access to DeFi using the most trusted DeFi wallet combined with the enterprise-required private key storage.”
The enterprise offering also has built-in compliance functionality that performs an analysis of your transactions in DeFi pools.
Decentralized finance has emerged as one of the most promising use cases in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. At the time of writing, approximately $195 billion of the total value has been locked up in the DeFi ecosystem. Ethereum-based protocols account for nearly 69% of the total, according to industry data. New research from DappRadar released last week shows that the reserved value in DeFi has grown by 936% over the past year.
Related: No more bitcoin encapsulated? This DeFi platform brings native BTC lending to Ethereum
DeFi’s growth has been recorded by the increase in the number of active users on MetaMask and other browser extensions. As reported by Cointelegraph, MetaMask surpassed 10 million active users in August, having grown nineteen-fold in just over a year.
