The Ethereum Foundation has formalized a partnership with the nonprofit security group Security Alliance, or SEAL, aimed at wallet drainer operations and other social-engineering attacks targeting Ethereum users. SEAL said the collaboration followed a request it made to the foundation late last year for support dedicated to security resources.
Under the agreement, the foundation is sponsoring a security engineer whose sole role is to work alongside SEAL’s intelligence team. The mandate is narrow and operational: monitor, track, and neutralize drainer activity, along with deceptive attack routes that have historically been used to siphon funds from users.
Drainers exploit user approvals through fake interfaces
SEAL described wallet drainers as malicious scripts or toolkits commonly deployed through spoofed websites or fraudulent emails impersonating trusted protocols. These pages are designed to push users into approving transactions that appear harmless. Once approved, the attacker can gain broad permissions and empty the wallet’s assets.
This makes drainers different from direct smart contract exploits. The core method is social engineering aimed at users. SEAL said scams of this kind have led to nearly $1 billion in losses over several years. At the same time, coordinated industry action against scam infrastructure and better detection reduced losses tied specifically to drainer attacks to about $84 million in 2025, the lowest level on record.
SEAL says dedicated teams can keep pace with attackers
SEAL called drainers a major obstacle to broader crypto adoption, while arguing the problem is solvable with sustained attention and well-resourced defensive teams. Its position is not that the threat is minor, but that it can be contained with focused execution.
According to the organization’s research, a small group of dedicated and well-funded engineers can keep up with drainer development and reduce widespread attacks against retail users. That conclusion helps explain why SEAL sought structured backing rather than one-off support.
The work sits inside Ethereum’s 1TS security push
The partnership is part of the Ethereum Foundation’s “Trillion Dollar Security” initiative, or 1TS, which is intended to move the ecosystem toward proactive and data-driven security practices. The emphasis is on spotting and ranking risks before they are exploited at scale.
Beyond operational support, the collaboration has also produced a security dashboard covering multiple parts of the network, including user experience, smart contracts, infrastructure, consensus performance, incident response readiness, and social-layer governance. Each area contains dozens of risk controls under active monitoring, giving developers and stakeholders a way to prioritize mitigation work.
The Ethereum Foundation publicly endorsed SEAL’s efforts and said the group has already delivered meaningful benefits to the ecosystem through past security contributions. SEAL, for its part, described the arrangement as a model for wider industry cooperation. The announcement said this is the first of several planned initiatives with forward-looking ecosystems, and SEAL added that it is open to talks with other foundations or crypto projects interested in similar sponsorship structures.