Are there really 10M active MetaMask users and 50M active Brave users? I mean, that's a lot. Twitter has ~200M daily active users and it's a service everybody knows.
I've installed both products maybe five years ago, tried a few things and gave up, and there's no incentive in sight that would make me use them again. I suspect they're still counting me as a user on the brave web3 frontier because I have some wallets whose private keys I've lost ages ago.
Brave Browser states 50M monthly active users [1] and MetaMask states 30M monthly active users. [2] The Chrome extension shows 10M+ [3] which is the source I used. It seems like Daily Active Users (DAU) is more often used than Monthly Active Users (MAU), so I maybe should have stated that in my comment.
Ok, thanks, that's useful! I'm glad Brave is doing well. It's not a product for me, but anything that reduces consolidation in the browser market is welcome.
To my knowledge, the Chrome Web Store user count represents the number of users with the extension installed who have opened Chrome in the past 7 days. So the 10M+ number for MetaMask includes everyone who installed the extension but isn't actually using it.
(The MetaMask reviews are pretty interesting reading. "I lost $3k", "I lost $6k" and so on.)
> To my knowledge, the Chrome Web Store user count represents the number of users with the extension installed who have opened Chrome in the past 7 days. So the 10M+ number for MetaMask includes everyone who installed the extension but isn't actually using it.
It's active by default on all websites. As long as it is active, a user can resolve linked ENS domains.
Right — I actually forgot we're talking about ENS, not wallet users.
The 60M+ user base for ENS-enabled browsers is a genuinely impressive number. But at the same time it's about 1.1% of the world's total internet users. In terms of reach, it's basically like making your product a desktop Linux app — it might be the right choice for some niche, but not for any mass market.
For the actual ENS lookup, I presume Brave and Metamask actually call a service like Infura? It feels like that's a step back for decentralization compared to plain old DNS.
> The 60M+ user base for ENS-enabled browsers is a genuinely impressive number. But at the same time it's about 1.1% of the world's total internet users. In terms of reach, it's basically like making your product a desktop Linux app — it might be the right choice for some niche, but not for any mass market.
It took time to for ENS to build this userbase and it had to start with nothing. I don't know what the final result will be with this, but I think this is a good starting point.
> For the actual ENS lookup, I presume Brave and Metamask actually call a service like Infura? It feels like that's a step back for decentralization compared to plain old DNS.
Yes. It seems like many people who are creating in this space do not actually care about decentralization.
The internet has mostly existed in peace with the governments in most democratic countries. Though, at the same time, I think even with Tor, the average person in China probably struggles to get around the firewall.
It's possible to set the RPC node for MetaMask and Brave browser. There are also extensions on GitHub that resolve from a local node. Though, this solution is probably too unrealistic for the average user. I think in the past I've seen discussions about querying nodes directly, but, I'm doubtful there's going to be more solutions soon.
Plenty of people, myself included, use Brave as a privacy-focused web browser without using or caring about any of its crypto features. Hell, I've been using Brave for years and I'm still not even sure what its crypto features are.
I've installed both products maybe five years ago, tried a few things and gave up, and there's no incentive in sight that would make me use them again. I suspect they're still counting me as a user on the brave web3 frontier because I have some wallets whose private keys I've lost ages ago.