EIP-712 Signing.

An Ethereum standard for typed, structured off-chain message signing that lets wallets display human-readable intent (e.g. 'sell 1 ETH to user X by Friday') and bind the signature to a domain, chain, and contract. It belongs to the Web3 & Blockchain category of cybersecurity.

An Ethereum standard for typed, structured off-chain message signing that lets wallets display human-readable intent (e.g. 'sell 1 ETH to user X by Friday') and bind the signature to a domain, chain, and contract.

EIP-712 (Ethereum typed structured data hashing and signing), authored by Remco Bloemen, Leonid Logvinov, and Jacob Evans in 2018, is the standard underlying virtually all modern off-chain signing flows on Ethereum and EVM L2s. Before EIP-712, signing a message meant calling `eth_sign` on a 32-byte opaque hash that a wallet had no way to render — a UX and security disaster. EIP-712 introduces structured types (`bytes32 typeHash`), domain separators that bind the signature to a chain ID, verifying contract, and version, and a JSON-RPC method (`eth_signTypedData_v4`) that lets wallets display field-by-field what is being signed. Use cases include Permit and Permit2 ERC-20 approvals (no on-chain transaction needed), OpenSea / Blur listings, gasless meta-transactions, ERC-4337 UserOperations, off-chain governance votes (Snapshot), and most Web3 game-economy signatures. From a security perspective EIP-712 enables but does not guarantee user comprehension: phishing kits routinely craft EIP-712 payloads that look like a benign 'login' but actually authorize unlimited token spend — the same pattern Inferno Drainer and successors abuse. Wallets that warn on known-dangerous EIP-712 patterns (Wallet Guard, ScamSniffer, Rabby) are the practical defense.

Defences for EIP-712 Signing typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: EIP-712, Typed structured data signing.