Detecting and Understanding the Ethereum Provider

In this topic, we use the Ethereum provider API of our wallet. The provider API is specified in EIP-1193 to maintain a consistent API for interacting with wallet accounts and the blockchain.

MetaMask provides such a provider API.

It allows websites to:

• read and interact with user’s accounts
• read data from the blockchain
• sign and send transactions

Extensive information about MetaMask and its provider API can be found here.

Historically, the provider was made available by window.ethereum. If you check if that is true, then the provider is available.

Another way to detect a provider is to use a library that does this for you. Some libraries support multiple platforms.