Ethereum · Decrypt
Ethereum Developers Propose Patch to 'Blind Signing' Risk Tied to Large Losses
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A group of Ethereum developers and advocates has put forward a plan to end “blind signing,” a technical feature of Ethereum’s transaction flow that has led to potentially billions in lost funds, highlighted by last year’s nearly $1.5 billion Bybit hack —the largest crypto hack of all time.
Key facts
- Working off of existing clear signing efforts, the group’s solution leverages a pair of existing Ethereum Improvement Proposals—Ledger’s previous work on ERC-7730, a standard for human-readable
- The Trillion Dollar Security Initiative was launched last May in an effort to make the layer-1 network robust enough to potentially support billions of users securely holding more than $1,000
- As part of the effort, the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative will act as a “credibly neutral steward” of the clear signing registry
- The working group behind the standard includes the Ethereum Foundation, hardware wallet firms Ledger and Trezor, and self-custody wallet providers MetaMask and WalletConnect, among others
Summary
Ethereum developers proposed a fix to blind signing, the act of signing transactions without easily understandable language on what will happen. The solution, "clear signing," would let users sign transactions in a "what you see is what you sign" format. The effort is being built by the Ethereum Foundation, Ledger, Trezor, and others industry builders. The “clear signing” open standard seeks to end the practice of blind signing—or approving transitions by interpreting “low-level, machine-readable formats that are accurate but difficult to interpret without technical expertise”—by providing users with information in a “what you see is what you sign” format.