**Introduction: A Recurring Nightmare**

February 2025 once again made headlines in the crypto community with a devastating incident. Safe (Wallet), a multi-signature solution regarded as a benchmark in the industry, lost $1.6 billion in a front-end attack. Ironically, the attack did not stem from some sophisticated zero-day vulnerability or quantum computing black technology, but from an age-old problem—the user interface for interacting with keys itself was flawed.

The numbers are shocking: since 2020, over $50 billion has vanished from various so-called "secure" wallets without a trace. The attack patterns are all too familiar—blockchain itself remains intact, cryptographic systems are still robust, yet users’ funds mysteriously evaporate.

This raises a painful question: have we been defending the wrong gate?

**The real issue isn’t protection, but architecture**

At this point, it’s worth reflecting—if the vulnerability isn’t in the security measures themselves, could it fundamentally lie in some blind spot of the underlying design?

**The geographical location of assets and keys**

First, correct a common misconception: your wallet doesn’t actually contain assets.

Sounds absurd, right? But that’s the reality. Your Bitcoin isn’t stored in a Ledger hardware wallet, nor is your Ethereum in MetaMask’s database. True crypto assets exist on the blockchain—a distributed ledger that is indestructible, fully transparent, and permanently recorded. Hackers cannot directly attack it, tamper with it, or make it disappear out of thin air.

So, what is stored in your wallet? Essentially, a string of keys—the keys to access on-chain assets. A wallet is a keyring to the blockchain vault, not the vault itself.

This distinction may seem subtle but is actually crucial. The blockchain itself is unbreakable; the point of failure lies precisely in the interaction between humans and keys—that is, the wallet’s user interface and operational flow.

**Why front-end attacks are so effective**

When a user clicks “Confirm Transaction” in a wallet, what exactly happens? Your private key needs to be invoked, a signature operation must occur, and communication with the blockchain must be completed. At each step, there’s a potential for interception.

Wallet applications may be tampered with, browser extensions could be injected with malicious scripts, and even the confirmation window you see might not be the real transaction data. Users see a confirmation interface, but the backend transaction could be entirely different.

This is why $50 billion has flowed into hackers’ wallets. The blockchain as a ledger is secure, but at the moment humans interact with it, they are extremely vulnerable.

**The root of the problem**

If we accept that the front end of wallets is inherently fragile, what is the solution? Perhaps the issue isn’t simply “building a more secure wallet,” but fundamentally changing the architecture of key management. Some emerging solutions are attempting to redesign this process using Passkeys, multi-party computation, privacy-preserving computation, and other technologies, aiming to make user interactions with blockchain assets more trustworthy and secure.

But before that, every participant needs to understand: your “secure wallet” might not be as safe as you think. True security may require starting from a fundamental rethinking of what a wallet really is.