The initiative, anchored by ERC-7730 and a new attestation framework, aims to make human-readable transactions the default across wallets and protocols.
The Ethereum Foundation on Tuesday formally launched Clear Signing, an open standard intended to replace the unreadable hex strings that most wallet users still approve when signing on-chain transactions.
The initiative bundles three components: ERC-7730, a JSON descriptor format that lets contracts describe their functions in plain language; a neutral, mirrorable registry of those descriptors; and ERC-8176, an attestation framework that lets auditors cryptographically vouch for the accuracy of those descriptors. Open developer tooling rounds out the launch.
The Foundation said that blind signing, in which users approve raw hex data without being able to verify what they are authorizing, has fed “billions” in ecosystem losses.
How it Works
When a wallet supports ERC-7730, it reads a contract’s descriptor file alongside the raw calldata and reconstructs the transaction as something a person can actually read. A Uniswap V3 swap, for example, would render as “Send 1,000 USDC, receive minimum 0.42 WETH” rather than a function selector and a list of integers. Descriptors live in an open registry, but wallets independently decide which registry instances they trust, and any party can mirror or self-host.
ERC-8176 layers integrity attestations on top. After a descriptor is merged, auditors can publish signed attestations confirming its accuracy, letting wallets apply their own trust policies and weight descriptors that carry multiple independent reviews.
The Foundation is acting as a neutral steward. Contributors span hardware (Ledger, Trezor, ZKnox), software wallets (MetaMask, WalletConnect), security (Cyfrin), infrastructure (Fireblocks, Zama), and tooling (Sourcify, Argot). The work also ties into the Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative, a broader push to harden Ethereum infrastructure as on-chain institutional value climbs.
Ledger originated clear signing as an internal security project in 2021, formalized it as ERC-7730 in 2024, and earlier this year transferred governance to the Foundation to make the standard credibly neutral. The April 2026 release of ERC-7730 V2 expanded coverage to cross-chain use cases, software wallets, and confidential-token primitives.
Why it Matters
Blind signing has been a recurring root cause of high-profile crypto losses. February 2025’s $1.5B Bybit exploit and the roughly $235M WazirX breach both involved signers approving transactions whose true intent was not displayed, alongside a steady drip of wallet-drainer phishing attacks that hide malicious approvals behind opaque calldata.
Standardizing descriptors does not eliminate that risk on its own, since coverage depends on developers writing ERC-7730 files for their contracts and wallets choosing to honour them. But it lowers the bar dramatically: any wallet implementing the standard can render transactions for any protocol that has published a descriptor, without bespoke integrations.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
