How Infura Helps MetaMask Scale at the Speed of Web3 Growth

Executive Summary

MetaMask was Infura’s first customer. The relationship between MetaMask and Infura goes back to the beginnings of the Web3 ecosystem. When MetaMask launched in 2016, users had to connect to their own node first in order to access Ethereum. This introduced a lot of friction and extra steps for users wanting to transact or connect to a decentralized application (dapp). In many ways, Infura was born out of ConsenSys to resolve this friction and make it easier for end users to connect to Ethereum.

Today, MetaMask is the most used wallet in Web3 and connects over 30 million people to dapps everyday. In 2021, Infura’s Ethereum API supported 4.8 trillion in on-chain transaction volume, most of which originated from MetaMask. MetaMask’s significant growth over the years would not have been possible without Infura as one of their infrastructure providers.

Since the beginning, it has been crucial every infrastructure piece is built to ensure it can withstand MetaMask’s user growth and has resulted in high-performance and scalable APIs, while being committed to decentralization by never locking in MetaMask or its users to a single node provider. MetaMask has been able to scale at the pace of Web3 demand due to the ongoing support and ethics of the Infura platform, providing foundational infrastructure for reliable data access. MetaMask uses Infura to connect to Ethereum and other EVM-networks, as backup and recovery disaster so users don’t experience outages, and to make it easy for users to switch and connect to their own node or the provider of their choice.

"Infura's faithful hosting of Ethereum data has given blockchain access to millions of people who would not have been willing to dedicate a computer of their own to validating the chain. It's critical that users can run their own clients, but it's relieving that they don't have to."

Dan Finlay
Co-Founder of MetaMask

Challenges

The first true stress test of Infura was during the CryptoKitties explosion in 2017. CryptoKitties is a game for breeding and selling digital cats on Ethereum. Upon its launch in 2017, CryptoKitties was the fourth smart contract ever deployed on the Ethereum mainnet and quickly rose to be the number one game by transaction volume.

At the time of CryptoKitties' peak in popularity, MetaMask users experienced significant usability problems due to congestion on the network. In less than a few days, Infura went from processing 1 billion requests a day to over 7 billion. No one could have predicted an event like CryptoKitties triggering an uptick in transactions and Infura had to act fast to support MetaMask users.

Solution

The Infura team adapted by using Geth, the command line interface for running Ethereum nodes in Go Language, for off-chain indexing in order to make pull requests quicker. The team also built more websockets to push data out to users faster.

From then on, MetaMask has used Infura to request and update blockchain state for users through the Ethereum and IPFS API services. Infura is a blockchain data clearinghouse, ensuring the MetaMask user experience is seamless and scalable through consistent and reliable data access.

The vision of MetaMask is to transform the internet and world economy to one that empowers individuals through interactions based on consent, privacy, and free association. Infura is a key partner for MetaMask, because in order for the vision to be realized, access to blockchain data must always be available and the ability to build and scale dapps must be simple. Infura brings data consistency and reliability to MetaMask, to help them continue to scale at the speed of Web3 growth.

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