How to customize token approvals with a spending cap
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tl;dr: MetaMask allows you to manually edit the number of tokens dapps can access. Click here to jump straight to how.
What is the point of token allowances?
When you interact with any dapp that involves your ERC-20 token holdings in some way or another, you're likely to have to approve its access to that token's smart contract (the same applies for ERC-20 equivalents on other chains, such as BEP-20 on BNB Chain). Then, when you decide, for example, to add 1,000 of token A and 1,000 of token B to a liquidity pool, the dapp already has your permission to take the necessary quantity of tokens straight out of your wallet, and all you have to do is confirm the transaction.
Token allowances are specific to one token. That means that if you've granted an allowance for a dapp to access your USDT, for example, it is only USDT that it can access.
In most cases, token allowances that exceed what you need for any single transaction are very convenient; it would be time-consuming to have to grant permission anew for every transaction you wish to make on the dapp. Pre-approving access to a number of tokens at once is, therefore, something of a quality-of-life feature that makes your web3 activities smoother.