Here’s how an Ethereum upgrade helped drain part of Binance’s $6 billion loss
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
On Ethereum, the attacker used a 2025 upgrade built to make ordinary wallets smarter, armed with 50 signatures from Binance's own wallet. A Binance wallet signed a permission on Thursday that let an attacker-controlled contract operate it. Less than four minutes later, about $2.5 billion in ether and tokens was gone. That was only part of the roughly $6.3 billion Binance says was stolen across several blockchains. On Ethereum, the attacker used a feature called EIP-7702, named for its Ethereum Improvement Proposal number. It went live in May 2025 as part of the Pectra upgrade. To see why it mattered on Thursday, lets start with what an ordinary Ethereum wallet is. Most Ethereum wallets, from a retail user's browser wallet to an exchange's hot wallet, are controlled by a private key. The key signs transactions and the wallet sends them. An ordinary wallet can't follow rules of its own, such as a daily spending limit or a list of approved recipients. Wallets that can follow rules are…