Since its launch in 2024, SEAL has worked with industry partners and law enforcement to address one of the biggest threats to casual and experienced crypto users: drainers. These scammers deploy fake websites imitating trusted protocols to convince the user to approve a few simple transactions in their wallet. If the user does, their wallet is quickly drained of all valuable assets. Over the past few years, ScamSniffer estimates that drainers and other phishing scams are responsible for almost 1B USD of losses, but the combination of SEAL’s active efforts and market cycles kept losses in 2025 at an all-time low of 84M USD.
Drainers are both a significant impediment to wide-scale adoption of crypto and a solvable threat given sufficient attention and effort from defenders. Our research indicates that a small team of well-funded security engineers can keep pace with drainer development and prevent wide-scale attacks against retail users.
Late last year, we approached the EF with a proposal to test this hypothesis, and we’re excited to announce that through the 1Ts initiative, the EF has sponsored a security engineer whose sole mission is working with the SEAL Intel team to track and neutralize drainers targeting Ethereum users. We look forward to sharing our progress along the way.
Our collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation is the first of many planned initiatives with forward-thinking ecosystems. If your foundation or crypto ecosystem is interested in similar sponsorship opportunities, we’re happy to discuss how this model protects users at scale.