Ethereum Foundation Deputizes SEAL; Funds Dedicated ‘Drainer Hunter’ in Security Pivot
The Ethereum Foundation shifts from passive grants to active defense, funding a SEAL engineer to hunt wallet drainers as $1.93B in theft looms over the ecosystem.
Market Intel: EF Institutionalizes White Hat Ops
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has formally entered the trench warfare against crypto phishing, announcing a direct sponsorship of the non-profit Security Alliance (SEAL) to fund a dedicated security engineer. This role’s sole mandate is to neutralize wallet drainers and social engineering vectors targeting the Ethereum ecosystem.
This move marks a significant shift from passive grant-giving to active, operational defense. The EF is effectively deputizing SEAL’s intelligence unit, already known for its SEAL 911 incident response channel, integrating independent threat hunting into Ethereum’s core fiscal strategy.
The Numbers: ETH traded flat at $2,113 following the news, reflecting a market focused on macro flows rather than infrastructure hardening. However, the operational impact is tangible: drainer scams siphoned approximately $1.93 billion in 2025 alone.
The ‘Trillion Dollar’ Dashboard
Alongside the personnel funding, the EF and SEAL deployed the Trillion Dollar Security dashboard. This tool quantifies Ethereum’s security posture across six critical dimensions:
- User Experience: Wallet interactions and signing flows.
- Smart Contracts: Code integrity and audit coverage.
- Infrastructure: Client diversity and cloud reliance.
- Consensus: Protocol stability and attack resistance.
- Monitoring: Real-time incident response capabilities.
- Social Layer: Governance robustness and phishing defense.
The dashboard provides a live “risk control” score, allowing institutions to audit the chain’s readiness to secure global financial infrastructure. This transparency layer is designed to force accountability on wallet providers and dApp developers, whose front-end vulnerabilities have become the primary attack vector for drainers.
“The Security Alliance has done important work to combat attacks and the ecosystem has benefited tremendously,” the Ethereum Foundation noted in a statement.
Institutional Context
This partnership signals the “professionalization” of crypto security. By bankrolling a specific role within SEAL, the EF is acknowledging that protocol-level security is insufficient if the user layer remains porous. SEAL’s existing integration with major wallets like MetaMask and Phantom allows this new intelligence capacity to push real-time blocklists directly to end-users, potentially cutting reaction times from hours to milliseconds.
For SEAL, this sponsorship serves as a proof-of-concept for a “security grid” model they intend to pitch to other L1 foundations. If successful, this could standardize threat intelligence sharing across fragmented chains, closing the arbitrage gaps currently exploited by sophisticated drainer syndicates.
