Charles Hoskinson Warns of Dangerous Code After Binance Wallet Exploit

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson warned Friday about code tied to a Binance wallet exploit, drawing attention to Ethereum’s EIP-7702 delegation feature and the risks of signed account authorizations.

“Careful, there is some seriously dangerous code out there,” Hoskinson wrote in an Oct. 30 post. He linked to bytecode analysis of a contract associated with Binance 14, but did not identify a specific flaw in EIP-7702 or say which analysis claims he endorsed.

An Oct. 29 transaction carried 50 signed authorizations for Binance 14, covering consecutive nonce values from 18,914,775 through 18,914,824. EIP-7702 requires valid signatures and nonce checks for authorizations. A separate transaction moved 167,464 Ether (ETH), 1.615 billion Tether (USDT) tokens and other assets from the wallet; the basket was valued at about $2.5 billion at the time.

Binance said its hot wallets were compromised on Oct. 29 and estimated the wider incident’s impact at about $6.3 billion. In its Oct. 30 update, the exchange said about $3 billion had been frozen on-chain, that it had found no evidence wallet private keys were leaked, and that its investigation was ongoing.

With EIP-7702, an Ethereum account can authorize another address to execute code on its behalf; that code can access the account without restriction.