Ethereum Community Launches New Security Feature
BITmarkets Team
May 14, 2026
“Approving a transaction is meant to be the last line of defense when exercising control over what happens to your assets on the blockchain. When it is done blindly, that defense does not hold,” the Ethereum Foundation said on Tuesday, describing blind signing as a “structural flaw” linked to billions of dollars in losses, including the $1.4 billion Bybit hack.
The initiative, built around the concept of “What You See Is What You Sign,” is already being adopted by several self-custody wallet providers, including Ledger, Trezor, and MetaMask.
Addressing blind signing vulnerabilities
The launch comes as the crypto industry continues facing increasingly sophisticated hacks and scams despite ongoing improvements in cybersecurity measures. North Korean state-backed actors have reportedly stolen more than $7 billion since 2009, with a substantial portion involving crypto-related attacks. The Bybit incident became one of the largest crypto thefts after attackers compromised a third-party provider and manipulated transaction signatures.
Tomáš Sušánka, chief technology officer at Trezor, said attackers have repeatedly exploited the absence of a broadly available system capable of distinguishing malicious smart contracts from legitimate transactions. According to Sušánka, users have often “unknowingly sign them, and lose everything,” adding that the Clear Signing feature “directly addresses this by making transactions human-readable before approval.”
The initiative was developed as part of the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and was initially proposed by Ledger through the open-source ERC-7730 token standard.
Industry-wide collaboration and rollout
The Ethereum Foundation said the Clear Signing framework includes features such as “human-readable transaction descriptions” and a “neutral, mirrorable descriptor registry.” The system also incorporates an attestation framework that allows auditors to verify transaction descriptors. Several additional crypto infrastructure and wallet providers contributed to the development of the feature, including Keycard, WalletConnect, Argot, Sourcify, Zama, ZKnox, and Fireblocks.
Sušánka said Trezor aims to implement the feature before June 30. “We're implementing this standard because it's the right thing to do for our users,” he said, describing Clear Signing as a “critical security advancement for our entire industry.”
Sources:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-contributors-launch-security-feature-to-end-blind-signing
https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/05/12/clear-signing-announcement