Foreign Code on Your Ethereum Address: How to Check Your EIP-7702 Delegation

An Ethereum address that belongs to you has been able to execute someone else's program code since the Pectra upgrade, without its address, its balance or its key changing at all. EIP-7702 is what makes this possible: one signature from you is enough, and from that moment on your address behaves like a contract. This is the basis for many convenient wallet features, and it is also the route by which attackers keep a drained account permanently under their control. This article shows you how to check in two minutes whether your own address carries such a delegation, and what to do if the contract sitting there is one you do not recognise. The basis for this is our own measurement on the Ethereum chain, taken today. It shows how widespread these delegations have become and what they mostly point to. The answer is more uncomfortable than wallet marketing suggests, but also more nuanced than a bare percentage implies. What an EIP-7702 delegation does to your Ethereum address EIP-7702 is an extension to Ethereum that lets an ordinary key-controlled account run the program code of a contract without becoming a contract itself. The account keeps its private key, its address, its balance a...