All blockchain hardware wallets are worthless unless either:
1. You spend 20 minutes per transaction verifying your calldata
2. All hardware wallets adopt a transaction legibility standard
"oh but my hardware wallet is EAL6 rated with a secure element and a MCU made from minerals mined from pluto's ultra secure crust that-" - It doesn't matter.
If you do not check calldata, you're essentially saying "I trust 100% that this website has not been hacked, because I trust whatever data they send to my wallet". It doesn't matter if your wallet is the most badass piece of security tech that's ever been, because you're letting hackers send whatever they want to your wallet, and you'll blindly sign!
We've seen websites hacked all the time.
@Compound_xyz was hacked just last week!!
Reference:
x.com/Compound_xyz/status/20β¦
And we've seen MASSIVE losses from these hacks across both retail and enterprise use.
- Bybit ($1.4B)
- Radiant Capital ($50M)
- WazirX ($200M)
Some wallets have done a great job of getting the ball rolling on their own like
@gridplus and
@KeystoneWallet who both offer calldata decoding at the device level.
@Ledger and
@Keycard_ offer EIP-712 digests for signatures which are easier to verify than EIP-712 structs.
@MetaMask snaps allow me to build my own custom AI bots and custom decoders to read calldata easier.
But it's not enough. Calldata is still very annoying to read, and decoding it can be more confusing. Not enough wallets support EIP-712 digests.
The good news... Is that transaction legibility is finally coming...
Once we have a standard in place for human-readable transactions, it will be unacceptable to use a hardware wallet that does not have such a feature. And we can FINALLY use hardware wallets the correct way!
I'M QUITE EXCITED.