Vitalik Buterin Flags Wallet UX Gaps With Multisig Walkaway Test

• Vitalik Buterin leveraged Etherscan’s read contract feature to examine multisig from a phone that didn’t have the Safe app. 
• He described the loophole as a quiet yet critical win for open infrastructure. 

The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is using a mundane multisig check and found that a lot of wallets do not pass basic usability and the walkaway test. 

The co-founder revealed that, “This morning I thought to check the addresses of those who were signers on my multisig and on my phone; I hadn’t installed any Safe app.” He further mentioned that instead of reinstalling Safe, he realised that he could just look up the address on Etherscan and use the ‘read contract’ feature to get directly what he wants. 

He described the loophole as a quiet yet critical win for open infrastructure. These are some kinds of extra UX benefits you get if your wallet or application is open source and clears the walkaway test. 

Simply put, if the front end vanishes, users must still access core functions through neutral tools such as block explorers. Buterin alerted that this same plan will somehow have to break due to privacy. 

Co-founder’s suggestion

His suggested direction is a viewing key… an extended version of their address and also comprises extra private info, having block explorers read that client-side through URL hash fields. 

He admits the trade-off and informs people that pasting any kinds of secrets into URLs or web pages is risky, and in the end, you’ll just be capable of doing more things via your wallets directly. 

Developers swiftly came up with alternatives. One reply highlighted an open-source tool, SwissKnifeXYZ, as one more open-source alternative, while Microchain Labs underlined microchain zk signers displacing explicit multisig signatures having a zk proof of authorisation, securing only a state root on-chain. 

The experiments now sit against a distinct backdrop: the appearance of U.S. spot ETH ETFs, where structural flows have initiated to redesign how Ethereum trades. The initial weeks of trading witnessed ETH ETF inflows concentrate liquidity at the front of the curve, reflecting patterns once linked with BTC products. 

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