A draft Ethereum Improvement Proposal posted on Friday would let an ordinary Ethereum account permanently disable EIP-7702 delegation, according to its discussion thread on Ethereum Magicians. EIP-7702 lets an externally owned account (EOA), a wallet controlled by a private key, hand its execution to smart-contract code. The draft’s author, posting as nicolashw, names institutional wallets, exchange hot wallets and treasuries as accounts that may not need that ability.

The rundown

  • What changed: The proposal, filed as pull request #12600, adds a one-way switch. An account sends a set-code transaction to itself with an empty authorisation list, zero value and no data, a form that is invalid today. That writes a three-byte marker, provisionally 0xef0200, into the account’s code. After that, no delegation can be installed or cleared, but the account keeps its address and can still send ordinary transactions.
  • Why it matters: On 29 Oct an address installed an EIP-7702 delegation on a Binance hot wallet before the Binance hack drained it, according to Etherscan records cited by Decrypt. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the delegation “did not pass through our normal approval controls”. The draft does not mention Binance.
  • Where it breaks: The draft says it “does not protect against ordinary private-key compromise”: whoever holds the key can still move the funds. A reply from forum user Zealynx adds two catches. The marker exists only on the chain where the opt-out ran, so a delegation signed for every chain could still work elsewhere. And a marked account could no longer receive ERC-1155 tokens or “safe” ERC-721 transfers from OpenZeppelin-based contracts, with no way back.
  • By the numbers: A fixed 33,500 gas per opt-out, 21,000 for the transaction plus 12,500, a figure the author calls pending benchmarks. Four open questions, including the marker prefix and whether to use a new transaction type.

Think of it as bricking up a door you never use. It keeps out one kind of visitor, not the one who already has your house key.

It is a draft. Any change to Ethereum’s core rules has to pass review and be scheduled into a network upgrade before it takes effect.

The Binance exploit also froze Aave’s markets on Thursday night. On keys, see what a private key is.

Read the proposal and the replies on Ethereum Magicians.

Related: Post-Mortem: Binance says attackers abused EIP-7702 delegation in its .34 billion theft

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.