Address delegation is the practice of granting a second party, contract or address the right to act for a blockchain address while the assets stay where they are. The owner of the address keeps its private key and its balance, but hands over a narrower power: voting with its tokens, staking with a validator, proving that it holds an asset, or, since Ethereum's 2025 Pectra upgrade, executing smart-contract code on its behalf.
The phrase is not a single formal standard. It is used across several mechanisms that share one idea, separating ownership of a wallet address from some of the rights attached to it. The main forms are governance delegation, staking delegation, delegate registries that link a cold address to a hot one, and EIP-7702 code delegation for externally owned accounts (EOAs). Each carries different risks, and none should be confused with sharing a private key.
Address delegation in plain terms
A shareholder who cannot attend a company meeting can sign a proxy form so that someone else votes their shares. The shares never leave the shareholder's account; only the vote travels. A landlord can likewise give a letting agent a key to show the flat, without giving them the deeds.
Address delegation works the same way on a blockchain. The address that holds the tokens signs a permission that points to another address or program, and that permission says exactly what the other side may do. The owner can usually cancel it later. The danger is a permission that is broader than the owner realised, much like signing a general power of attorney when a simple proxy would have done.
Governance delegation
Many governance tokens let holders delegate their voting weight to another address without transferring tokens. Compound's COMP token popularised this design in 2020, and widely used token libraries now include a delegate function in their voting extensions. The delegate, often a researcher or active community member, votes on proposals in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and the holder can switch or withdraw delegation at any time. In most designs, tokens must be delegated, even to oneself, before they count as votes. Projects such as Uniswap (UNI) and Compound (COMP) publish lists of delegates and their voting records.
Staking delegation
In proof of stake (PoS) networks, holders who do not run their own validator can assign the stake of their address to one that does. In delegated proof of stake (DPoS) and similar systems, the protocol itself records the delegation, and the delegator shares in rewards and sometimes in penalties. On some chains the coins never leave the delegator's address; on others they are bonded to the protocol for a period. The arrangement is described in more detail under delegated staking and staking pools, and differs from solo staking, where the holder runs the validator.
Delegate registries: linking cold and hot addresses
Holders of valuable NFTs or tokens often keep them in a cold wallet, but many projects ask users to connect a wallet to claim an airdrop, enter a token-gated site or mint new items. Connecting the cold wallet to unfamiliar sites undermines the point of keeping it offline. Delegate registries solve this by recording on-chain that a hot wallet may act for the cold "vault" address in specific ways.
The best-known registry is delegate.xyz (formerly delegate.cash), whose contract lets a vault delegate rights for all its holdings, for a single contract or for a single token, and to revoke them later. ERC-5639 describes a delegation registry along the same lines. The delegate cannot move the vault's assets; projects that integrate the registry simply read it to check whether the connected hot wallet speaks for a vault that holds the required tokens. The model only works where the project has built that check into its contracts or website.
EIP-7702: delegating an account to contract code
The most technical meaning comes from Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 7702, activated with the Pectra upgrade on 7 May 2025. It added a new transaction type through which an EOA signs an authorisation pointing to a smart contract (SC). The account's code is then set to a short "delegation designator" that tells the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to run the chosen contract's code whenever the address is called. The address, balance and private key stay the same, and the owner can later point the delegation elsewhere or clear it.
This gives ordinary accounts features previously limited to smart-contract wallets under ERC-4337: batching several actions into one transaction, having a sponsor pay the gas fee, and adding spending limits or recovery rules. It also creates a new route for theft. A user tricked into signing a delegation to a malicious contract gives that contract control over everything in the account, and security researchers reported phishing campaigns abusing this soon after Pectra went live. Authorisations include a chain identifier, but one signed for all chains can be reused across networks, a form of replay attack risk.
Across all four forms, the common rule is to read exactly what a delegation grants, prefer narrow and revocable permissions, and check that the delegate address or contract is the intended one.