Human-Readable Transaction

A human-readable transaction is one that a wallet displays in plain terms, such as "send 50 USDC to bob.eth" or "allow this app to spend up to 100 of your tokens", before the user approves it. Under the surface, a transaction calling a smart contract is a block of encoded data that most people cannot interpret. Approving such data without understanding it, known as blind signing, has let attackers trick users into granting unlimited token approvals or transferring assets to them. Wallets and standards try to fix this by decoding transaction data, simulating the result and showing the expected balance changes, and by using structured message formats, such as Ethereum's typed-data signing, so users can see what each field means. The February 2025 theft of about 1.5 billion dollars from the exchange Bybit, whose signers approved a transaction that looked routine, highlighted the risk. Also see digital signature.