Metamask Swap Router is an important revenue generating feature of the Metamask Wallet. In this dashboard, we will compare the Metamask Swap Router to other prominent routers like Uniswap, Sushiswap, 1inch, Paraswap.

A router is an essential feature of DEX. It calculates the most efficient swap route for a given swap and liquidity pools. Most DEXes have their own swap router to automate the swap route optimization, instead of manually finding out the liquidity pools to use. Other swap routers like 1inch and Paraswap make use of wide variety of liquidity pools to aggregate liquidity.

The router contracts are :

• 0x881d40237659c251811cec9c364ef91dc08d300c -- metamask
• 0xd9e1ce17f2641f24ae83637ab66a2cca9c378b9f -- sushiswap
• 0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c7bd8665fc45 -- uniswap v3
• 0xe592427a0aece92de3edee1f18e0157c05861564 -- uniswap v3
• 0x1111111254fb6c44bac0bed2854e76f90643097d -- 1inch
• 0x111111125434b319222cdbf8c261674adb56f3ae -- 1inch
• 0x11111254369792b2ca5d084ab5eea397ca8fa48b -- 1inch
• 0x1bd435f3c054b6e901b7b108a0ab7617c808677b -- paraswap

A swap handled by router starts with the user depositing funds into the router contract. Hence we will track asset transfers from the transaction originator to these contracts using ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers for ETH deposits and ethereum.core.ez_token_transfers for ERC20 token deposits.

We will look at 5 metrics, for each we will compare overall and daily metrics, aggregating data from the start of 2022.

User:

Let us look at the number of users interacting with these Routers.

27% of Users overall use Metamask Swap Router. Metamask only comes behind Uniswap in terms of user share. This could be because Uniswap is popular, esp with the story behind it (vampire attack, Token airdrop). Followed after this, Metamask comes in mainly due to the fact that its baked into the most popular wallet.

We can see this trend repeat on the daily data as Metamask router is only behind Uniswap in terms of users and ranges between 15 to 30% of the daily users

Swaps:

Now let us look at the volume of swaps

Similar to number of users, Swaps also sees Metamask come second, only to Uniswap. However the percent share is shrunk quite a bit, from 27 to 16. This is probably attributable to the fact that most Metamask swap users are less likely to be technical users putting out more volume of swaps.

The daily trend is the repeat of Users trend too. Only that the share has dropped below 20.

USD volume

Now let us look at the USD volume handled by these routers.

For the first time, Metamask is pushed below 2nd, with 1inch grabbing quite a fair chunk of both Uniswap and Metamask. Maybe the slightly more interested blockchain enthusiasts and huge VC funds tend to use 1inch as their premier DEX as, being an DEX aggregator 1inch provides the best rates and slippage and well known as an industry leading DEX aggregator.

Daily data imply that Metamask usually ranges below 10%, but generally above 5% of the total volume

Average and Median sizes of swaps:

Looking at Average and Median sizes shows the true nature and utility of 1inch. Being a DEX aggregator, it allows handling huge volume, where slippage and getting the right price is a bigger problem than gas expenditure, the trade off is made for slightly more gas expenditure to get the better slippage and rates. This means, on average 1inch swap sizes are larger.

Similarly, Metamask inbuilt swap users, tend not to indulge in DeFi quite a bit and are mostly retail consumers. This straight away implies, their volumes are meagre compared with other routers and hence smaller sized.

Conclusion:

• Metamask tends to beat all Routers except the ever-popular Uniswap routers
• However on the volume side, Metamask suffers and the built in swap is rarely used for making large volume swaps.
• This is primarily a difference between the types of users that use the routers as Metamask router users tend to use the Wallet to store funds, while other router users tend to use the wallet as a gateway into DeFi.