MetaMask Review 2026: It Does Bitcoin Now, and Swaps Cost 0.875%

MetaMask is the default key to decentralised finance. If you want to use a lending protocol, mint an NFT, connect to a DEX or interact with almost any Ethereum-based application, this is the wallet those applications assume you have. Over 30 million people use it monthly[3], and that ubiquity is genuinely the product — things simply work with it.

It is not a savings wallet. It is a hot wallet — one whose keys sit on an internet-connected device — living in a browser extension or phone app, and its risks come almost entirely from what you connect it to. Used as an operational account with a hardware wallet behind it, it is excellent. Used as the place your crypto lives, it is a mistake.

Pairing with a Ledger or Trezor is the single most valuable change you can make to a MetaMask setup holding real money — you keep the interface and move the keys offline.

For most of its life MetaMask meant EVM chains and nothing else, and advice to that effect — including ours until now — is out of date. Native support arrived for Solana in May 2025, Bitcoin in December 2025 and Tron in January 2026[1][2].

Deriving Bitcoin and Solana addresses from the same seed as your DeFi wallet is convenient and worth thinking about. One phrase now controls more of your holdings, which raises the cost of losing it or exposing it. Many people deliberately keep long-term Bitcoin on a separate seed for exactly this reason.

MetaMask takes a 0.875% service fee on every in-app swap, unchanged since the feature launched in October 2020. It is applied inside the quoted rate rather than shown as a line, and it sits on top of the underlying pool fee of roughly 0.05% to 0.3% and network gas[1][2].

You are not obliged to pay it. Connecting MetaMask to a decentralised exchange directly and trading there costs you the pool fee and gas without MetaMask's cut. The in-app swap buys convenience and route aggregation, which is worth something — just not always 0.875%. On a $5,000 swap that is about $44.

MetaMask offers pooled ETH staking for any amount through StakeWise contracts, and full 32-ETH validator staking. Both carry a commission: reported as 10% of profits on validator staking and 15% on pooled staking[2]. That is lower than Wealthsimple's 30% cut but higher than running your own validator, which costs nothing but effort and competence.

Staking is unavailable to users in the United States and United Kingdom for regulatory reasons[1]. Our sources do not state MetaMask's position for Canada, so check in-app rather than assuming availability either way. Whatever the platform, staking rewards are taxable income in Canada at their CAD value when received — see our tax guide.

MetaMask's own security record is unremarkable in the best sense. Two incidents of note: a 2022 disk-cache bug, and a 2023 breach at a third-party support vendor affecting around 7,000 users. Neither compromised custody of anyone's funds[1].

Losses happen a different way. Because MetaMask is the key to DeFi, it is the most heavily targeted wallet in crypto, and the attacks are aimed at you, not the software: phishing sites that mimic real protocols, and drainer contracts that ask you to sign an approval which quietly authorises someone to empty a token balance.

MetaMask is frequently called open source, and our own comparison page said so until now. The accurate position: the major repositories are public and readable, and the code has been audited by firms including Cure53, but it has been under a source-available proprietary licence since 2020 rather than an OSI-approved open-source one, with no reproducible-build process[1][2].

In practice you can read the code, which is the part that matters most for security. You cannot freely fork and redistribute it, and you cannot verify that the extension you installed was built from the source you read. That is a real distinction from Trezor, and it is why we have removed the open-source badge. MetaMask is owned by Consensys, the US company founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.

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