Ethereum Foundation Launches Clear Signing Standard to End Blind Wallet Approvals

The Ethereum Foundation unveiled Clear Signing, an open standard that makes transaction approvals human-readable. The release targets blind signing, a flaw the foundation said has fueled billions in user losses. Built around ERC-7730, the framework lets wallets display plain-language descriptions of each transaction before users approve it. The Ethereum Foundation’s One Trillion Dollar Security Initiative will steward the underlying infrastructure as a credibly neutral host. Why Blind Signing Has Become a Costly Default In many crypto exploits, the final step is not a software bug but a user approving a transaction. The Foundation’s announcement framed that approval gap as the core problem. Even after phishing or infrastructure compromise begins a breach, the last action typically falls to the wallet holder. Clear Signing aims to make that defense hold. 0/ Clear signing is now live. An open standard to end blind signing, making human-readable transactions default. This effort brings a major UX and Security upgrade to transaction signing on Ethereum. pic.twitter.com/nIGRCBQh6G— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn) May 12, 2026 Approvals today often appear in low-level machine code that requires technical expertise to interpret. Some users rely on a separate device to double-check transaction details when the application could be compromised. The foundation cited the Bybit incident among recent cases where signed transactions drained user wallets. How Clear Signing Works ERC-7730 introduces a shared format that turns transaction data into clear, human-readable descriptions. Instead of being stored on-chain, these descriptions are kept in a decentralized off-chain registry and distributed to wallets. Another standard, ERC-8176, allows independent auditors to verify and cryptographically confirm that these descriptions are accurate. Based on these verifications, wallets can decide which sources they trust. Because the system works off-chain, existing apps don’t need t...