Ethereum Wallet Delegation Risks Exposed: Study Reveals Widespread Attacker Involvement

A recent peer-reviewed study has highlighted significant security risks associated with Ethereum's EIP-7702 wallet delegation feature, which allows standard wallets to temporarily behave like smart contracts. The researchers found that attacker-controlled contracts were tied to the majority of early transactions using this feature, raising concerns about its safe deployment across the ecosystem.

The study analyzed over 22.8 billion transactions across seven blockchains and isolated 3,664,166 EIP-7702 authorization transactions specifically. It was discovered that 63% of these transactions were linked to contracts identified as malicious, with a total of 924 confirmed malicious contracts.

The researchers estimated that the confirmed losses from these attacks sit at $2,362,848.76, spread across three distinct attack types. However, they noted that this figure only represents verified harm and may not reflect the true scale of abuse.