Ethereum Foundation unveils the next stage of its trillion dollar security initiative

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has revealed plans for the next phase of its Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) project.

This follows an ecosystem survey conducted to identify the most urgent issues within Ethereum infrastructure.

Wallet Security Standards

In a blog post on August 20th, EF announced that the first action of the security initiative will primarily target user experience (UX) issues.

“During this first wave, we’re starting a series of work targeting key areas of UX security. The work we started today is a combination of years of short-term actions and long-term projects.

The main goal of 1TS, which first launched in May, is to enhance network security and promote wider on-chain adoption. The program is expected to unfold in several phases, initially going on over the coming weeks and months.

One important effort involves establishing “minimum security standards” for Ethereum wallets. EF explained that secure UX is important because users need to be able to securely manage keys, sign transactions, and understand the actions they want to approve in distributed applications.

The proposed standards include features such as transparent transactions, a compromise-resistant interface, an architecture that provides privacy, and rules for managing wallet behavior such as approval management and key handling. To support this effort, the nonprofit has awarded a grant to Walletbeat. This will help you develop and evaluate benchmarks.

Blind Signs and Transaction Transparency

The foundation also highlighted the blind signature as a major issue in UX security. There, users are often asked to approve transactions without understanding. To address this, we plan to promote Transaction Decoding. This will expand the use of transaction simulations that present human-readable details instead of raw code and preview clear results before approval.

This post revealed that EF has launched several research projects aimed at increasing transparency in wallet transactions. The plan includes setting new standards to make transactions easier to interpret, reviewing past proposals, and investigating security upgrades of potential protocols, making simulation tools more reliable and widely available.

It also takes actions to help developers avoid deploying vulnerable code. This will help reduce the number of compromised smart contracts. This includes creating an open source database of related vulnerabilities that allow programmers to check their code for known issues before deployment.

The study also pointed out that there is a demand for simpler wallets designed for non-technical users and enterprise-centric apps with features like privacy, censorship resistance and compliance options.

The EF move comes months after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the ecosystem roadmap focused on L1S, Blobs and user experience.