What EIP-7906 would change in Ethereum transactions

“The total value of crypto assets stolen to date exceeds the annual GDP of a mid-sized country.“.

This is how the beginning of the Motivation section in the Draft Proposal EIP-7906which was created in early 2025, meaning that “GDP” has since then swelled due to various exploits.

Of course, the on-chain theft problem is not unique to the Ethereum ecosystem, but Ethereum undoubtedly has a major thorn here, namely the “de facto blind signing” of Allas the authors of EIP-7906 say, because today there is no way to easily control and restrict the effect of transactions once signed.

In other words, there is no network level management on resultsonly on signed call data. This means that something like a wallet or issuance simulation UI can show incorrect data or miss hostile intentions, and Ethereum will still validate whatever was executed because a provided signature authorizes it. executionand not a verified result.

This gap between intention and execution is exactly what EIP-7906, aka transaction assertionsis supposed to resolve. The introduction of this standard will be crucial, to the point that its arrival will mark a sort of “before” and “after” milestone in Ethereum UX.

It looks like we won’t have to wait very long either. EIP-7906 is propose for inclusion (PFI) in Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade and has already been demonstrated in a Hegotá devnet alongside frameworks. The inclusion of EIP is not yet officially considered/scheduled, and it could be pushed to the next Ethereum upgrade, but it is possible that we see it live in 2027 at the earliest.

That’s all the general context here, but to understand how transaction assertions actually work, you need to know the basics of “frame transactions” by EIP-8141which East already officially planned for Hegotá and around which EIP-7906 is basically built.

As you might imagine from their name, frame transactions divide transactions into executivesthat is, short, labeled steps with different tasks. One executive can validate a signature, another can let a sponsor pay for your gas, with others you can make approvals, trades, batches, etc.

EIP-8141: Frame transaction

Add a frame abstraction for transaction validation, execution, and gas payment

However, in its default structure, EIP-8141 does not have built-in result checking to ensure that your frame list only do what your wallet screen said. Here, indicate transaction assertions, because EIP-7906, if pushed to the mainnet, would add a frame mode for precisely this type of verification work.

The new frame mode proposed by the EIP is specifically POST_TXwhich should be at the very end of your frames list. It would work as a static call, so it could read but not write anything, and its three new opcodes, TXTRACE, TXDIFFAnd EVENTDATACOPYwould only work indoors.

What is interesting is that when POST_TX runs, your actual balance, storage, and event difference changes would already exist, and your smart account would then look at that data. If the results do not match what is expected, the execution images will be rolled back. Accordingly, EIP-7906 may veto chain results rather than mere (and potentially flawed) overviews.

In this paradigm, you would be able to guarantee that a trade would trigger as expected or avoid an approval drainer after attempting to fake an NFT mint that was quietly nefarious, and so on. Everything the opcodes expose could be verified against literal traces of your transactions instead of simulations or call data summaries that hostile interfaces can tamper with.

Granted, transaction assertions are not a panacea for all security issues in the Ethereum ecosystem, but it is safe to say that they can prevent many future losses on-chain. We don’t need to sign deals and just hope for the best. We can authorize execution and then refuse to keep the results if something goes wrong.

This is a powerful change that will prove to be an important advancement for Ethereum UX. For now, the main remaining question is timing. In a week, Ethereum client teams will submit their ranking preferences for further Hegotá inclusions, so we will know more about the community’s appetite for upcoming transaction assertions sooner or later, like the upgrade after Hegotá.