MetaMask Permissions Upgrade

Giving an artificial intelligence agent your crypto wallet keys is like handing over your house keys, your car keys, and your safe code at the same time. MetaMask is pushing a different model: let software use a wallet, but only inside narrow rules that the user can set and later revoke. (docs.metamask.io) The basic tool is a smart account, which is a wallet controlled by code instead of only by one private key. MetaMask’s Smart Accounts Kit says those accounts can delegate specific actions to another account, including a website, an app, or an automated agent. (docs.metamask.io) That delegation is being standardized in Ethereum Request for Comments 7710, a proposal for smart contract delegation on Ethereum. The proposal says one account can grant another account bounded permissions such as time limits, spending limits, or task-specific powers through a single signature. (eips.ethereum.org) A second standard, Ethereum Request for Comments 7715, covers the wallet side of the handshake. It defines how an app asks a wallet for permissions so the wallet can show the user exactly what is being requested before anything is granted. (eips.ethereum.org) MetaMask calls its implementation Advanced Permissions, and its own example is unusually concrete: a user can approve spending 10 United States dollar coins per day to buy Ether for one month. After that approval, the app can keep making those daily purchases without asking the user to sign every single trade. (docs.metamask.io) That sounds small, but it fixes one of the biggest problems in crypto automation. Most decentralized apps still ask for a fresh signature on every action, and Ethereum Request for Comments 7715 was written partly to remove that friction for games, recurring actions, and other highly interactive apps. (eips.ethereum.org) It also changes the risk profile for artificial intelligence agents. Ethereum Request for Comments 7710 explicitly lists “bounded permissions to AI agents or automated systems” as a target use case, which means the standard was designed with machine-operated wallets in mind from the start. (eips.ethereum.org) The key word is bounded. MetaMask’s documentation says permissions can be fine-grained and can include periodic or streaming rules for native token transfers, so an agent can be told “send this much, this often, for this long” instead of “do whatever you want.” (docs.metamask.io) Revocation is the other half of the story, because a permission that cannot be turned off is just a slower version of full access. MetaMask has already shown revocation tooling in production-style workflows, including a January 16, 2025 post about automating token approval revocations during exploits with its Delegation Toolkit. (metamask.io) Under the hood, MetaMask’s stack splits the job in two parts. Ethereum Request for Comments 7715 handles the permission request from the wallet, and Ethereum Request for Comments 7710 handles the delegated execution after the permission exists. (metamask.io) That is why this upgrade is showing up in conversations about agentic wallets and automated treasury software. A treasury bot that can pay invoices up to a fixed cap, or rebalance a portfolio on a schedule, is useful only if the human owner does not have to hand over unlimited control first. (docs.metamask.io, eips.ethereum.org) MetaMask is not pitching this as a one-off feature buried in a wallet menu. Its developer docs position Advanced Permissions and the Delegation Toolkit as building blocks for apps that can act for users even when the wallet is not actively connected, which is exactly the behavior people want from software agents but have struggled to secure safely. (docs.metamask.io, metamask.io)