What Data Leaks When You Transact With Different Wallets

Transcript

[music] Oh, yeah. Here we go. Okay, cool. Thank you. No, I don't need that. >> Uh, let's see. How long do I go for? Oh, there's a giant clock there. Word. Word. What's up? I'm Austin Griffith. Uh, so to um got a bunch of things going on doing the wedgie like you you mentioned a bunch of things. Eth skills. This is just a quick side project. I was in a meeting uh in the EF and we were discussing how to even think about all the things that leak in your wallet when you use it somewhere. And during the meeting, I'm already talking to my bot to build me something. And it built this kind of isolated environment where it

spins up a Mac OS instance, installs a MetaMask, sends in $5, and then does some action. And then we keep it in the container and we watch what it does. What leaks out of this container when when you go do those actions. And um then we were thinking how do we even visualize this once we have this list of information? Here's here's what happens when you use Rabby. Here's what happens when you use Amire. You know, there's all these different leaks that happen. And after thinking about it for a while, I'm not sure if it was me or Claude or something in between, but the idea of a subway map came uh came from this. And so if we

were to look at the normie send, which I think is probably the most like used uh transaction path, we have this uh uh map, right? So each of these are kind of like these subway stations and you can kind of see through them. So, this is I should back up. I'm I'm not doing a good job of explaining this. This is ethereum authority.com. So, terrible website. Definitely not great uh for SEO and being able to type it in. Uh but it was just a a repo and I was like, I might as well just make a website. It's one one prompt to turn it into a website. So, Ethereum Authority.com is the um the result of this work of

taking uh a container, giving it a wallet, having it do some action within that wallet and watching everything that comes out of it and then um kind of aggregating all that data together into some learnings about where are the highest leverage places that we can uh as the EF like come in and try to make these wallets more private, more self-s sovereign, uh less stuff leaked in in places. So, diving back into the normie send, um these are the different types of data. So, let me zoom in a little bit here. So, your uh the blue line is like your IP and your device, right? So, MAC

address, uh, your your address in the red line is basically your Ethereum address uh recipient transaction intent, uh, the account list, transaction ID. So, and then, and then there's kind of like this crops line here of like how crops is this thing and what thing would be we we be worried about. And then at the top, the buildings. I kind of you think of the subway underneath and the buildings up above. These are sort of like the institution that kind of receives your data, right? So the normie send would be MetaMask probably the top used browser extension. So the normie any normie out there opens up MetaMask and wants to send ETH from one place to

another. Where all does the data go and what all data leaks? And you can kind of see here the answer to that question is is slightly gnarly, right? Like first blockade, right? So blockade gets your IP, your MAC address, your Ethereum address, and who you're sending money to. And uh down here on this pink line, it shows I wish there was a better legend. I thought Oh, here it is. Here it is. The pink line, the crops line. Can they block it? Can they lie? and can they shape what you sign? And all three of these things uh are are bad here.

Right? [gasps] So then it goes to infura and the nons uh that that's all you're doing is saying hey I'm my address is you know Austin Griffith that's ens that's a whole another thing but my address is x uh what is my non so I can make a transaction right so we've gone to blockade already and they've got all your information then we go to infura to get what is the next nons then we go to uh meta masks apis to get uh the gas price. Uh and all that's leaking there is your IP and device, right? They're not giving the address and recipient, but then on the next line, you see that

to estimate the gas within Fura, it gives it all of it again. So, you can kind of see all these stops on the subway map. You can see who's receiving the information. And you can see kind of like how crops that is in terms of I I don't know if I have to say crops deacronize here, but censorship resistant, open source, privacy, security. Uh can can they censor your calls? Can they change what what you're sending through? Uh can they trick you into signing something bad? So MetaMask APIs, Infura, Blockade, you can see are kind of the usual suspects up here across the top. And then the the subway crosses signature river and this is where you sign your transaction

and you relay it uh to the mempool and builders decide to put it into a block and then uh there's a couple more infura stops here where the receipt of your transaction and ether scan uh kind of comes back with something here and the accounts API from MetaMask. So all these different stops that happen along the way. Uh you can see that like there's not in this flow is like a simulation or or a fiat ramp, but this is basically the the landscape of what one of these maps looks like. And you can kind of go through any of uh a given send or wallet swap or anything and you can see the

same thing. So this would be Rabby. So different wallet, same information here along this side. And look at all these different stops of all this data. So you can kind of see uh the Rabby uh API goes to DBank and goes to Hyperlquid and goes to the DBank API. And this this is like the the usual what what you'll see is generally what happens is a wallet has their own backend and just like hella information is spewing into the wallet's backend and if you want to get around this you have to run all that infrastructure yourself.

Sure. And maybe the wallet allows you to point at that other infrastructure. But generally like a lot of this stuff is just like built into the wallet. It's not even something you can opt out of. So when we think of privacy and security, um these are just concerns we want to think about and we don't want to just like fix a little bit, right? There's there's a lot to fix here. So we need to figure out like what is the highest leverage thing we can do. And um let me zoom back out a little bit. If we Oh yeah, shoot. This is another thing here is like where your data goes. There's this nice kind of diagram here of like the main players. And like I said, like for the Rabby wallet, it's the Rabby API, right?

If we go look at another one here, like uh doing an ENS name lookup, right? So again, the consensus APIs, blockade, the consensus RPI or RPC, a lot of those are what gets hit. And there's some like longtail things down here where a little bit of data goes there. Uh but then thinking about in aggregate like what is the biggest offender if we keep looking through all of these and I'll come back to some of these in a little bit but I think down here at the bottom is this. Okay. So the top we kind of aggregate the biggest things here and some of these we like can't really do

anything about like CloudFront and Cloudflare. Uh to go around those you basically need to have a local DAP, right? You can't just if if you want to talk to a DAP, it's got to go through some of these uh stops just to get to the DAP to work. So what what you would need is the DAP needs to be open source. You need to be clone it down locally and then you need to have it talk to your own node. And I think that's like like hella cippher punk, right? Like not a lot of people are going to do that. We can barely get people to like run their own nodes, let alone like run their own frontends that talk to their own nodes.

So, some of these things are like we're probably not going to get around some of them and we have to think about which ones are the ones that we can get around and how how can we have the the biggest impact and and get people around those. So, you can go to Ethereum Transit Authority, you can look through these things and see uh all the stuff that leaks. Uh and then down at the bottom, you can kind of figure out which things are going to be the highest leverage things that you can do. Uh and what the very first thing and the very easiest thing and you do have to have some hardware but you should run your own node like the the first answer here is run your own Ethereum node and in the ai it's easier and easier the hardest part

is basically like buying the machine right you probably need to have a machine with like a 4 terbte drive which was cheap 3 years ago and is expensive now which I don't think any of us saw that coming like Moore's law and everything's getting cheaper. If I buy hardware now, it's going to be worth half the price next year. It actually doubled or tripled in value which is like what is happening right now? So so many weird things are are happening in the world with with AI. Uh, one good thing that comes from this is there's going to be this whole renaissance of local hardware, open- source hardware, Linux, things, things that were traditionally kind of like only nerds get to mess around with that.

Now everybody can because you can just give it to your agent and your agent can can run this stuff. So if you give your agent client.buildguild.com, that's where I'm at right now. It's just a oneline command to run Ethereum node. So probably the highest leverage thing you can do is to run your own Ethereum in node either in your local hardware or even on your own machine. But you need to have a pretty big drive and that's that's the hard part right now. We're going to get to the point where we have light clients and therefore people are going to be much more decentralized but we're not at that point yet. Uh so highest leverage thing is probably to run your own node. Easiest way to do that is client.buildguild.com.

Uh, but there's some more things here. Let's go look at leverage. What leaks the widest? Yeah, like everyone has your IP address. Everyone has your Ethereum address. So, uh, yeah, this is you can you can kind of just like look through this data on your own time. Uh, the the takeaway is that the probably the biggest thing that we can change is the wallet APIs. Uh and basically what we need is someone to build a wallet that doesn't phone home every step of the journey, right? Uh there was someone who made something called the plane wallet. And this is just like a dude on Twitter made this.

Uh I I think there's like a one in a thousand chance that dude is in here right now. But you're not any anybody in here is the plane wallet guy? No. Okay, good. That would I mean that would be cool. But so someone made something called the plane wallet and it's just like we're not going to make all these calls and you can see it just uses a public RPC. There's there's not all the other that happens when you go mess around with another wallet. Uh now you're probably not getting a lot of things, right? You're not getting that blockade warning when you're interacting with some scary contract or basically anything I deploy gets blocked by blockade because it's like a brand new app people are connecting their wallet to. Um let's see. 26 seconds. Okay, let's see. How do we finish this out?

You can go to ethereumtransit aority.com. You can look at how wallets leak, but the tlddr is a lot of stuff leaks in almost all of the wallets. Uh we need a wallet that doesn't leak those things, and we need end users to be more um vigilant about running their own nodes and uh their own simulators and a lot of other things like that. And AI is going to allow for that to happen. So in the future, you can be more cippher punk by prompting your agents, build me a simulator, go grab this simulator that's open source that comes with this wallet.

And then on the other side, the wallet builders need to be more vigilant about both allowing users to sub in their own infrastructure. Hey, instead of you sending all my data to a simulator, uh, just go run this open source simulator on my own hardware. Okay, I think that's all for me. [laughter] Martin, >> thank you so much, Austin. We have a minute and a half for questions. I see there's already one over here. There'll be a box thrown at you, Luke, over here. >> Watch out.

>> Catch. >> Talk into this. >> Talk into the box. Yeah, >> that's great talk. I love that um that website. That's >> uh so I think like the question is about wallets, right? Um, so I think there's very good reasons as to why wallets end up with architectures that leak your data. It's not like they're evil companies or something and they're trying to sell your data or whatever. There's good reasons for all that right? >> So, I don't think the answer is necessarily a new wallet. Maybe we should just skip this whole thing about wallets being produced or coded up by external teams and just go straight to agents running >> uh your entire software, right? So you can have your own custom set of

requirements locally that your agent has to strides in this direction like if I want to go make my agent manage all my funds for me across like how many different seed phrases and like hundreds of different um like uh addresses and whatever. Where do I go? Do I start from scratch >> there? So, first of all, you should be very careful. Like, agents still probably shouldn't be managing seed phrases for people. Like, you can give your agent a seed phrase, but it needs to be kept in isolation. And don't put more than like 10 or 20 bucks in there because agents still leak private keys all the time.

Uh, there are skill files out there like eSkills.com. Esskills is is a good library that you can give to your agent and it will like upgrade itself. there's an AI kind of movement inside of the EF where we're looking at open-source models and transaction evaluation, Ethereum evaluation, building evaluation, and then training models on top of that. But that's like in its infasy infancy right now. And then on top of all of that, like models are too afraid to make transactions for you. If you tell Opus 5.5 to go make a transaction for you, it will just straight up refuse. So yes, I agree. AI is the new UI and we're maybe going to

go away from clunky wallets and clunky DAPs. Uh, but there's kind of these edges on what the AI can do. There are skill files out there. [music]