The Ethereum Foundation, together with major wallet developers, has introduced a new security standard called Clear Signing, aimed at protecting users from inadvertently approving malicious transactions—a vulnerability that has enabled some of the crypto industry’s largest hacks, including the $1.4 billion Bybit theft by the Lazarus Group.
The core problem is blind signing, where transaction approvals display unreadable strings of hexadecimal data, leaving users unaware of what they are actually authorizing. Clear Signing replaces this with simple, human-readable descriptions such as “you are swapping 100 USDC for 0.05 ETH on Uniswap.”
The framework hinges on ERC-7730, an open standard originally proposed by Ledger in 2024, and a public registry at clearsigning.org. Anyone can submit contract descriptors to the registry, which are then reviewed and attested by independent security researchers. Wallet providers can pull these verified descriptions and present them to users before signing, ensuring a “What You See Is What You Sign” experience.
The Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative will oversee the registry infrastructure and has released tooling libraries to ease adoption. The move follows months of intensified focus on security, including research into post-quantum solutions and a $1 million subsidy to offset audit costs. Industry figures like Trezor CTO Tomáš Sušánka have endorsed the standard as a “critical security advancement” that every wallet provider should embrace.
