What if engaging in financial transactions was as seamless as sending a tweet? Well, that’s exactly what you can do with Maskbook - a browser extension that lets you directly access DeFi/web3 from within other apps and websites (as shown in the GIF below). I know I say it a lot, but this is basically money legos on steroids!
Taking a step back, it’s obvious to anyone in Ethereum that DeFi apps already offer a “seamless finance” experience because we can move value around on Ethereum as fast as we move data around on the internet. Something like Maskbook takes this a step further by directly embedding Ethereum/DeFi into interfaces that people are already familiar with. Imagine that you see someone talking about a new token on Twitter - without something like Maskbook, you’d have to go looking for the place to buy the token or find its contract address to insert it into Uniswap. If you use Maskbook, you can simply click the coin ticker on Twitter and purchase it without leaving the website. Though I am curious about how Maskbook is filtering out the scams!
Let’s take this concept of “seamless finance” a little further - what if we could embed DeFi into YouTube? Imagine watching a video from your favorite YouTuber and you wanted to tip them some interest-bearing DAI (such as cDAI). Well, you could go to Compound, deposit DAI, get cDAI, ask the YouTuber for their Ethereum address and then send them the cDAI. Or, the YouTuber could have an embedded link/button that a user could click which automatically takes the users DAI, deposits it into Compound, issues them cDAI and pays it out to the YouTuber - all in 1 seamless transaction.
The above is just a basic example of what’s possible with seamless finance - I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant developers out there already working on more complex use-cases using this technology and the money legos available on Ethereum. Personally, I would love to see more apps integrated into Twitter - I would totally use something like Maskbook more often if I was able to check on and interact with my yield farms while I was browsing through my feed. We’re probably getting into ‘Bloomberg terminal’ territory now though!
Maskbook is just one tool in the seamless finance toolkit - others such as Zapper, Zerion, MetaMask and more enable users to tap into the new money rails on Ethereum which are themselves a paradigm shift for how people interact with financial applications. And, of course, the more of these tools we build, the more people we’ll be able to reach!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.
That’s so cool! Imagine a use case where you watch a YouTube vid and whilst watching it’s downloading to your storage, you stream stable coin micro payments to initially watch, then others pay micro payments to you for hosting and to the content creator.