The Ethereum Foundation has taken one of its clearest security steps in years. Clear signing is now live as an open standard on Ethereum, built to replace the old habit of approving raw hexadecimal strings most users cannot read or verify.
The Foundation described it plainly in its announcement. Blind signing has contributed to billions in ecosystem losses, a figure that has quietly grown with every phishing attack and malicious approval request that slipped past users who had no way to read what they were actually signing.
What the Standard Actually Changes
Until now, signing a transaction on Ethereum could mean staring at an opaque string of hex code on a hardware wallet screen or browser extension, then hoping the dApp in front of you was telling the truth. That gap between what users see and what they sign is where billions went. With clear signing, those transactions now show in plain language instead of the raw technical data wallets used to display.
The working group behind this describes the principle as “what you see is what you sign.” A swap on Uniswap V3, for example, would now display the token amounts, the protocol name, and the minimum received, rather than a raw function selector and encoded integers.
ERC-7730 and the Attestation Layer
The technical foundation sits on ERC-7730, an open standard that defines a JSON format for human-readable transaction descriptions. On top of that, a neutral and mirrorable descriptor registry keeps the metadata accessible without any single company controlling it. An attestation framework under ERC-8176 allows auditors to verify that descriptor files have not been tampered with, which matters more as adoption spreads and more dApps submit their own descriptors.
Developer tooling ships alongside the standard, built for wallets, protocols, and auditors who want to add or verify clear signing support.
The contributor list spans hardware wallets and software wallets alongside security and infrastructure firms. Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, and WalletConnect cover the wallet side. Cyfrin handles security. Fireblocks and Zama bring infrastructure support. Sourcify and Argot contribute tooling. Individual builders and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative round out the group, with the Foundation serving as a neutral steward rather than controller.
Ledger’s Groundwork and What Comes Next
The open standard builds directly on clear signing work Ledger pioneered before the Ethereum Foundation stepped in as steward. Ledger launched its Clear Signing Initiative in 2024 and released a Generic Parser in 2025 that reads ERC-7730 metadata from dApps. According to Ledger’s documentation, the governance of the ERC-7730 standard has since been formally handed to the Ethereum Foundation so it stays neutral infrastructure rather than a vendor feature.
For everyday Ethereum users in markets where mobile wallets and DeFi access are growing fast, this shift carries weight beyond the technical details. Phishing attacks and malicious approvals hit hardest where users have less experience reading raw transaction data. Plain-language transaction displays reduce the gap between what a dApp promises and what a wallet actually asks you to sign.
The Foundation confirmed in its announcement that this remains ongoing work, with contributors continuing to expand coverage, improve tooling, and push adoption. More information is available at clearsigning.org.
