According to a Bloomberg report citing blockchain security firm Blockaid, the attackers behind the massive Binance breach paid just $15 in network fees to set up a delegated transaction authorization using Ethereum’s EIP-7702 feature. Designed to make user wallets easier to operate by allowing accounts to temporarily authorize external software to act on their behalf, the feature was hijacked to grant attacker-controlled code direct execution powers over Binance’s core hot wallet. Roughly three and a half minutes after paying the nominal gas fee, the hackers executed a single transfer moving approximately $2.5 billion comprising 167,464 Ether and over 60 other tokens, led by $1.6 billion in Tether (USDT) bypassing the slow multi-step withdrawals typically monitored by exchange safety systems. Because the authorization was natively registered directly on the Ethereum blockchain, abruptly shutting down Binance’s internal hot-wallet services failed to immediately cancel the permissions, allowing subsequent secondary transfers to push total losses higher before stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle froze billions on-chain.

Full report : Blockchain analysis reveals attackers weaponized Ethereum’s EIP-7702 feature to bypass standard safeguards and execute history’s largest single cryptocurrency heist.

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