How EIP-7702 Became the Critical Permission in the Binance Hot-Wallet Attack

By Isaac • October 30, 2026 11:11 am •

The Binance attacker did not need to break Ethereum itself. The more troubling explanation is that the attacker found a way to turn a legitimate Ethereum permission feature into an execution path inside a compromised hot wallet.

A technical overview from Decrypt focuses on EIP-7702, an Ethereum upgrade that lets an externally owned account temporarily behave more like a smart contract. The feature can support batched transactions, sponsored gas and more flexible wallet behavior, but the report says the Binance attacker used delegated execution approval over a hot wallet, bypassed normal approval controls and then used a self-destruct mechanism that complicated the first forensic review of an incident estimated at $6.4 billion.

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