From coindesk By Margaux Nijkerk| Edited by Nikhilesh De

What to know:

MetaMask, the popular self-custodial crypto wallet for the Ethereum (ETH) network, shared a flurry of announcements on Thursday, aimed at improving its wallet's user experience.

Part of Metamask's revamped roadmap includes adding smart contract capabilities to its current wallet. At the moment, MetaMask is an Externally Owned Account (EOA), a type of wallet that is controlled by a public and a private key. One of the main downfalls with EOAs is that it is subject to human error, meaning if you forget your private key, you lose your crypto holdings in that account forever. The other type of wallet that exists on Ethereum are Contract Accounts (CAs), which are controlled by code and have recovery mechanisms in place and security checks for verifying transactions.

In a blog post shared during ETHDenver, the largest North American Ethereum conference, the MetaMask team said “smart-contract-based accounts allow us to solve a number of problems: allowing new powerful uses of the assets you hold, while simultaneously improving security. When the user defines their terms from their own programmable account, we greatly expand how the user expresses their agency in ways that are enforced by their own code.”

One of those new features aimed at making the user experience on MetaMask easier include ERC-5792, which builds on its current feature, smart transactions. Under ERC-5792, or known as batched transactions, users can combine certain steps when it comes to signing off transactions, like “approve + swap” in one click, meaning that they would save time and gas fees by batching those steps together.

Dan Finlay, the co-founder of MetaMask, told CoinDesk that batching transactions “give us all the things you're going to ask for in order, we'll present them to the user in a nice, unified way. The user will pay for one gas fee for the series of events and then it'll just be one block for the whole series of operations.”

MetaMask card

The MetaMask team also shared that its MetaMask debit card will be available in select states in the U.S. starting mid-March. The card has been in production for a few months and was initially available just to users in the UK and EU.