Ethereum Foundation Will Provide a Solution to a Long-Standing Major Issue for ETH

The Ethereum Foundation, along with wallet developers and security companies, has announced a new “Clear Signing” standard aimed at resolving the long-debated “blind signing” issue within the Ethereum ecosystem.

The open standard developed under the “One Trillion Dollar Security Initiative (1TS)” aims to prevent users from approving transactions without understanding their content.

The foundation stated that some recent major security incidents stemmed from users approving transactions without fully understanding what they were signing. Events like the Bybit attack, in particular, demonstrated how critical the risk of “blind signatures” has become.

The main goal of the new system is to implement the “what you see is what you sign” approach. Accordingly, users will see clear, readable, and structured descriptions of transactions in their wallets, instead of complex machine code or hexadecimal data. To this end, the ecosystem has implemented the ERC-7730 standard, a transaction description record system, a verification mechanism, and various development tools that enable wallets to display transaction behavior in a standardized manner.

According to the proposed structure, any developer or team will be able to create a transaction description for a protocol. These descriptions will then be verified and signed by independent reviewers. Wallet providers will be able to choose their own trusted data sources. By keeping the description data separate from the transaction infrastructure, the solution is said to be compatible with current and future Ethereum applications.

The Ethereum Foundation announced that it will maintain the Clean Signature infrastructure as a “trusted neutral structure” and support its adoption across the industry. The initiative is currently supported by several ecosystem representatives including Ledger, MetaMask, WalletConnect, Fireblocks, Trezor, Keycard, Cyfrin, Sourcify, ZKnox, and Zama.

*This is not investment advice.