There's a key aspect of securing your crypto funds that not many people are aware of, and that's called Clear Signing.
Clear Signing is a security tool that converts the often confusing hexadecimal hashes seen in blockchain transactions into something we can actually read. This is super important because it lets users see exactly what they're signing. For instance, instead of a string of random characters, it would say something like "Send 1 BTC to Michelle". This helps avoid those annoying "blind signing" scams where you might unknowingly approve a sketchy transaction.
I've tried a bunch of crypto wallets, especially the popular hot wallets, and they usually use this weak standard where you just see a long string of characters. It really hides the real intent behind the transaction, which is why it gets called blind signing.
So why is Clear Signing such a big deal?
- First off, it helps prevent scams and stops users from accidentally giving the green light to malicious contract calls that could wipe out their funds.
- It also makes interacting with Dapps much safer and more transparent.
If your wallet has Clear Signing, definitely turn it on and always double-check your device screen before you approve any transactions.
As someone who owns a Keystone 3 pro, I know this feature is available. Does your wallet support Clear Signing too? If it does, drop the name of your wallet here so we can create a helpful list for others!
Clear signing is definitely underrated, especially now that blind signing is one of the main attack vectors for wallet drainers. Translating raw calldata into human-readable intent makes a huge difference for transaction verification, particularly with smart contracts and dApps. Its not a silver bullet, but combined with hardware wallets and good UX, it significantly raises the security baseline for users.
Most Bitcoin users will not relate to this as transactions on the network are mostly straightforward, you enter an address you want to send to, pick a feerate and then sign the transaction. Clear signing is useful when you are interacting with other features of the crypto world like dApps and smart contracts which involves third parties that could be trying to scam you.
Ledger is the one wallet I know which added clear signing to their system.
I don't know about Clear Signing!
About "long strings of characters" on wallet (or in my opinion, an address), I know that a multisig wallet's address is longer (has more characters) than a single signature wallet address. I am unsure that it's what you mean or you mean something else, please clarify.
Address length.
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/keys/address/
The article you linked explains why Bitcoin addresses look like long strings, not transaction calldata.
What Clear Signing refers to is hex-encoded calldata / contract calls, not address length.
Hole IOMultisig addresses may involve more complex scripts, but users are still signing a transparent BTC transfer. Blind signing becomes a real issue mainly when interacting with smart contracts and dApps.
For your information, bybit hack was caused by hacker forging malicious payload to sign and UI manipulation. The billions couldn't have been hacked if they are using clear signing to review the transaction.
Any wallet really need to implement this to prevent people losing money.
I didn't know about this possibility. According to the description, this function seems very useful to me, but so far I have not seen such functionality in any of the wallet applications. As I understand it, is this only available in hardware wallets?
The UI is the weakest point in many systems - look at the old MSDOS vs macOS or (now) Windows. Ditto here, the UI should help prevent problems but often it is the cause of them, or at least hides the problem so that by the time one realizes there was an issue it is too late.