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Web3 Security · 7 min read · October 9, 2026

How EIP-7702 Delegation Attacks Drain Crypto Wallets in 2026

EIP-7702 has quietly become one of the fastest ways crypto wallets are emptied in 2026. Instead of stealing a seed phrase, an attacker can win contract-level execution rights over your account from a single signature — and the approval-revoking tools you trust will not stop it.

What Is EIP-7702 and Why It Changed Wallet Attacks

EIP-7702 arrived with Ethereum's Pectra upgrade on May 7, 2025, and it quietly rewrote how a wallet gets drained. The change lets an ordinary wallet — an externally owned account, or EOA — sign a single authorization that points its execution at a smart contract. The wallet then behaves like a smart account, and the delegation stays in place until you replace it.

It was designed to make wallets programmable without deploying a contract. It runs through a new type 0x04 "set code" transaction carrying an authorization tuple. Once installed, the wallet's code slot holds a three-byte marker, 0xef0100, plus the address it now delegates to. That persistence is exactly what attackers wanted.

Two Attacks, One Primitive

Most coverage folds two different attacks together, and separating them is the key to understanding your risk.

The sweeper: a leaked key made cheaper to exploit

In the "sweeper" pattern — often nicknamed CrimeEnjoyor — the attacker already holds your leaked private key. Instead of racing every deposit with a bot, they sign an EIP-7702 authorization from your own address that delegates it to their sweep contract. Any ETH dust, airdrop, token or NFT that lands is forwarded out automatically, usually in the same block.

The root cause is the leaked key, not the standard. EIP-7702 simply made sweeping cheaper and faster than racing every deposit with a frontrunning bot — cheap enough to authorize tens of thousands of addresses for cents each.

The phishing signature: the genuinely new danger

The second pattern is the one unique to EIP-7702. There is no prior key theft. The attacker persuades you to sign a delegation yourself, disguised as a "wallet upgrade", a "security enhancement" or an "AI assistant authorization". One signature hands contract-level execution rights over your account to someone else.

How Big Is the Problem in 2026?

The scale was obvious within weeks of launch. Wintermute's research team found that more than 97% of mainnet delegations in the first month pointed to copy-pasted sweeper contracts. Another analysis concluded that 63% of the EIP-7702 authorization transactions it sampled were tied to malicious contracts, with draining activity behind more than $2.3 million in confirmed thefts.

Individual cases are stark. On May 24, 2025, Scam Sniffer flagged a MetaMask user who lost about $146,551 to a malicious EIP-7702 batched transaction linked to Inferno Drainer. By late August 2025 a single user had lost $1.54 million in a 7702 phishing attack. The tactic matured through 2026 rather than fading:

• April 2026: a campaign aimed at older EVM wallets, mostly four to eight years old, exceeded $800,000 across hundreds of victims and bridged roughly 324 ETH to Bitcoin.
• August 2026: more than $292,000 drained from hundreds of wallets in a short window, consolidated into DAI, ETH and BNB.
• September 2026: deceptive "approvals" that were actually EIP-7702 execute authorizations drained 530,000 SPARK tokens from a single wallet.

Those figures sit inside a larger wave: crypto losses hit roughly $740 million in Q1 2026 and about $2.69 billion year to date by early October. Sweeper drains are a persistent slice of that pie, quietly eroding the dust, airdrops and unmonitored wallets owners had written off.

Why Revoking Approvals Does Nothing

A token approval is a permission to move a specific asset. An EIP-7702 delegation is not a permission at all — it is code. Your wallet now is the attacker's contract, and approval-sweeping tools do not touch it.

How to Check Whether Your Wallet Is Delegated

A normal EOA has zero code. A delegated account returns about 23 bytes — the 0xef0100 marker plus the delegate address. You can check without connecting a wallet:

• Paste your address into a delegations checker such as eip7702.app, which scans major chains and flags an active delegation.
• Open the delegations tab in revoke.cash, or the approvals manager in Rabby Wallet, which now surface EIP-7702 state next to token approvals.
• Check the code directly. Call eth_getCode on your address: a plain EOA returns 0x, a delegated one returns the delegation bytecode.

One subtlety matters: a failed EIP-7702 transaction can still install the delegation, because the authorization is processed separately from the main call. Check the code afterward, not just the transaction status.

How to Revoke a Delegation

Clearing a delegation means sending a new 0x04 authorization pointed at the zero address, 0x000…0. That restores ordinary wallet behaviour. Setting the authorization's chainId to 0 makes it valid across every chain at once. Support varies by wallet, but Rabby and revoke.cash now offer one-click revocation.

Six Rules to Stay Safe

• Read what you sign. An EIP-7702 delegation is not an approval and should never appear in a routine connect-wallet flow.
• Refuse unsolicited "wallet upgrades". No legitimate dApp needs you to enable delegation to let you use it.
• Check for delegations regularly — the same habit as reviewing approvals.
• Sign with a hardware wallet that displays delegation details, or an air-gapped setup.
• Treat a leaked-key wallet as burned. Do not reuse or fund an address whose key was exposed, even after you sweep it clean.
• For burned wallets, use break-glass tools carefully. Utilities such as RescueKit and Antidrain use a sponsor wallet and a friendly delegation to batch-claim and move remaining assets atomically. They need the compromised private key and run client-side, so treat them as a last resort.

The Bigger Lesson

EIP-7702 is not a protocol bug. It is a powerful primitive with a sharp, user-facing edge. Earlier cycles went after seed phrases, approvals and fake airdrops; now a single disguised signature installs persistent code over your account. Read every prompt as if it were giving away your keys — in the delegation case, it literally is.