The Ethereum Foundation and a coalition of wallet developers and security firms formally introduced a coordinated open standard on May 12, 2026, to eliminate blind signing, a vulnerability that has cost crypto users billions of dollars and enabled the largest single crypto hack in history.

The standard centers on ERC-7730, a JSON-based format that tells compatible wallets how to display plain-language summaries of transactions before users approve them. Instead of showing a raw string of hexadecimal data, a wallet supporting the standard would show something like: "Swap Send: 1,000 USDC / Receive minimum: 0.42 WETH / Protocol: Uniswap V3." The guiding principle behind this architecture is "What You See Is What You Sign" (WYSIWYS): the transaction a user reads and approves should precisely reflect the transaction that executes on-chain. The initiative is being coordinated under the Ethereum Foundation's Trillion Dollar Security Initiative (1TS), with governance of the standard formally transferred from Ledger, its original author, to the Foundation to ensure no single vendor controls the registry.

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What blind signing actually means

Blind signing happens when a user is asked to approve a transaction by reviewing only a raw hexadecimal hash, a string of characters like 0x3a7f...d9c2 that conveys nothing about what the transaction will actually execute. This is not a fringe scenario. It is the typical experience for many users interacting with DeFi protocols or multi-signature wallets today.

The February 2025 Bybit hack made the consequences concrete. North Korea's Lazarus Group stole roughly 401,000 ETH (approximately $1.5 billion) from Bybit's cold wallet by injecting malicious JavaScript into the Safe wallet interface through a compromised developer machine. The script silently altered transaction parameters while displaying a routine transfer to the signers. Because the underlying calldata on the hardware wallets was unreadable, the signers had no way to detect the substitution. According to NCC Group's technical post-mortem of the incident, the transaction data presented on hardware wallet screens was not human-readable, making it difficult for signers to distinguish a legitimate transaction from a malicious one.

The Bybit incident was not isolated. Crypto hacks totaled $3.4 billion in 2025 across the industry, with North Korean state-linked groups alone accounting for $2.02 billion, a 51 percent year-on-year increase per Chainalysis data. Phishing attacks, in which victims are manipulated into approving malicious transactions, caused roughly $410.7 million in losses across 132 separate incidents last year.

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How the standard works

ERC-7730 has three components. The first is a descriptor format, a structured file that protocol developers write once to describe what their smart contract's functions do in plain terms. The second is a public registry, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation on GitHub at ethereum/clear-signing-erc7730-registry, where those descriptors are published via pull request. The third is a verification layer in which independent security researchers review submitted descriptors before they go live. Once a descriptor is merged into the registry, any compatible wallet fetches it automatically. No new app release is required.

The standard is also backward-compatible, meaning descriptors accompany transactions as external metadata and do not need to be embedded in existing contracts. ERC-7730 version 2, released in April 2026, added cross-chain compatibility and privacy features including support for FHE-encrypted field annotations relevant to confidential token standards such as ERC-7984. Developer resources and Rust and TypeScript libraries are available at clearsigning.org.

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet described the standard as "a public good" in a March 2025 post on X, noting it was designed for broad adoption across the ecosystem rather than as a proprietary Ledger feature. Guillemet added that "Ledger proudly supports this step toward safer smart contract interactions."

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Regional stakes: South Asia and Africa

The practical urgency of this standard is highest in regions where crypto adoption is growing fastest and retail users have the least familiarity with raw transaction data.

India ranks first globally in Chainalysis's 2025 crypto adoption index, with Pakistan ranking third and Bangladesh fourteenth. These countries account for tens of millions of active crypto users, most of them mobile-first and interacting with DeFi through software wallets rather than hardware devices. Hardware wallets with unreadable calldata displays are far less common in these markets due to cost and availability, which means the UI-level manipulation used in the Bybit attack is a realistic threat for everyday users. Pakistan's newly formed Pakistan Crypto Council and its forthcoming Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) have not addressed signing-layer security in published frameworks, leaving a meaningful gap that the industry-led standard would need to fill through voluntary adoption.

Africa's 75 million wallet users are disproportionately using crypto for payments and remittances rather than speculation, meaning they sign transactions frequently and in smaller amounts. The April 2025 collapse of the CBEX platform illustrated the regional consequences of opaque digital financial interfaces, with losses concentrated among users in Nigeria and Kenya. Fraud rates on the continent dropped 28 percent in 2025, but SumSub's 2026 report notes that attacks have grown more automated and systemic, incorporating AI-generated phishing, coordinated schemes, and synthetic identities. Neither India's current regulatory framework nor Nigeria's ISA 2025 mandates any wallet display standard, so clear signing's reach in these markets will depend on whether wallet developers adopt it voluntarily and how quickly local DeFi teams register their protocols.

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What comes next

The immediate test for the standard is adoption velocity. The coalition includes MetaMask, Trezor, WalletConnect, Fireblocks, and Keycard, alongside a range of security and tooling firms including ZKnox, Cyfrin, Sourcify, Zama, and Argot. But the registry only becomes useful to users once the protocols they interact with have submitted descriptors. Any development team building on Ethereum, including the growing number of remittance, savings, and real-world asset protocols based in Africa and South Asia, can now submit a descriptor to the public registry and immediately extend readable signing prompts to users on any compatible wallet. The Ethereum Foundation's 1TS Initiative was built around the premise that Ethereum needs to be safe enough for billions of people to store meaningful value on-chain. Clear signing is its most concrete user-facing output to date.