Ethereum bolsters security as Foundation backs SEAL

Ethereum Foundation SEAL partnership: dedicated engineer to curb wallet drainers

According to Security Alliance (SEAL), the Ethereum Foundation is backing SEAL’s effort to track and neutralize wallet drainers by sponsoring a full-time security engineer under the Trillion Dollar Security initiative, an approach SEAL, founded by white-hat researcher Samczsun, designed to keep pace with rapidly evolving drainer tactics. SEAL adds that cumulative phishing and drainer losses have approached $1 billion over several years, with 2025 losses reduced to about $84 million, described as an all-time low, as the group focuses on drainer infrastructure mapping, domain intelligence, and coordinated disruption.

As reported by TradingView, the Foundation said the Security Alliance has done important work and that the ecosystem has benefited from those efforts. The partnership signals a shift from case-by-case incident response to proactive, system-wide defenses that can propagate protections across wallets, dapps, and service providers.

Why it matters: coordinated phishing defense and user trust at scale

Phishing and wallet drainers now rely on industrialized playbooks, domain rotation, cloaking, and off-shore hosting, making isolated responses ineffective and slow. According to Cointelegraph, white-hat responders operating under SEAL’s Safe Harbor framework have clearer legal guardrails to intervene during live exploits and have been credited with preventing substantial losses, supporting a more coordinated, faster-moving defense network.

Connectors that sit between dapps and wallets can surface real-time warnings from a vetted domain database, improving the moment-of-intent user experience. “Every Certified wallet warns users when they encounter known scam sites,” said Derek Rein, CTO at WalletConnect, underscoring how shared intelligence can reach users at scale without requiring each wallet team to reinvent the same defenses.

Immediate impact: protections flowing through wallets and infrastructure

In practical terms, drainer and phishing intelligence compiled by specialized researchers can flow into shared infrastructure, where it is normalized and made consumable by many wallets at once. This creates consistent visual and programmatic warnings, such as risk banners, interstitials, and blocked connections, before a malicious approval or signature is finalized, reducing the chance that a single missed update exposes users across multiple applications.

Ecosystem coordination also improves timeliness: once a drainer cluster or domain family is flagged, connected services can propagate updates in near real time rather than on fragmented release cycles. While attackers will adapt, a shared pipeline from researcher telemetry to user-facing controls raises the baseline of protection and may lower the window of exposure for emerging campaigns.

Trillion Dollar Security initiative: role of EF-sponsored engineer

Within the Trillion Dollar Security initiative, the EF-sponsored engineer’s role centers on tracking drainer infrastructure, maintaining high-quality domain intelligence, and accelerating the handoff from research to wallet and infrastructure integrations. The position is designed to tighten feedback loops, turning discoveries into machine-consumable signals, and to measure impact with transparent loss-tracking and coverage metrics that help the community understand what is working and where gaps remain.

At the time of this writing, Ethereum (ETH) trades near $2,023.60, with very high short-term volatility around 16.15% and an RSI near 33.62 on a 14-day basis. This market context does not alter the security objective, but it frames why user trust and predictable protections remain priorities even when prices fluctuate.