Ethereum And BNB Chain Face $575M Security Hit Across Thousands Of Addresses

A peer-reviewed study presented at USENIX Security '26 has put a number on one of blockchain's most persistent problems. Researchers identified 65,340 high-risk address instances across Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, with associated asset losses amounting to roughly 127,000 ETH and 17,700 BNB, equivalent to over $574.8 million.

The loss figure was calculated using token prices as of May 2025, at $4,408 per ETH and $847 per BNB, meaning actual losses at the time of each incident may differ. Two active attack vectors described in the paper directly account for about $15.7 million, or 2.7% of the broader estimate.

How Attackers Exploit Address Misuse

The study separates the problem into contract-account misuse and externally owned account misuse. Contract-account misuse occurs when someone sends a function call to an address that has no contract code on the selected network. The transaction can still succeed as a simple transfer without executing the intended function, leaving funds stranded at that address unless later-deployed code can move them.

To build their dataset, researchers mined 63,004 GitHub repositories created between January 2015 and May 2025, as well as a Stack Exchange archive. They extracted more than 16.3 million deduplicated private keys from GitHub, then combined direct key matches with transaction-pattern rules and lightweight symbolic execution across Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain.

The research also flagged EIP-7702, a relatively recent Ethereum improvement proposal, as an emerging attack surface. With EIP-7702 delegation in place, the assets in a user's account may be entirely controlled by smart contracts. If a user unknowingly delegates their account to a malicious contract, an attacker could gain control and steal funds, according to Ethereum's own developer documentation. Anti-fraud service Scam Sniffer has confirmed that phishing attacks targeting EIP-7702-upgraded addresses have been on the rise.

High Detection Accuracy, Broad Implications

The authors reported 99.11% precision for their overall address-misuse detection.The researchers also noted that address misuse is not unique to EVM-based chains. Any account-based blockchain employing the same deterministic address derivation mechanism, such as Solana and its testnet, is susceptible to the same risks.

Both types of address misuse can also affect standard tokens such as ERC-20 and ERC-721 assets. The authors describe their findings as a lower bound for the severity of this risk, with plans to examine a broader range of chains and tokens in future work.

The findings underscore a structural vulnerability that spans two of the largest blockchain networks and reaches well beyond individual user errors, pointing to systemic gaps in how addresses are generated, reused, and verified across platforms.

Sources:USENIX Security '26: Lost in Blockchain Address Misuse (Official Presentation Page)CryptoSlate: Risky crypto addresses flagged in USENIX studyEthereum.org: Pectra EIP-7702 Security Guidelines