Most people assume famous wallets are either perfectly clean or secretly compromised. The reality is more nuanced, and more interesting though.
I've been building Chlora, a wallet risk scanner that analyzes on-chain history and returns a risk score based on token approvals, unverified contract interactions, and suspicious patterns. I thought to myself why not try to scan some of the most well-known Ethereum addresses to see what the data actually shows.
Here's what I found.
Vitalik.eth — 1/10
10,000 transactions. 3 approvals. 13 unverified contracts. No HIGH flags.
The cleanest active wallet I've seen. The best part isn't the low score, it's the discipline behind it. 10,000 transactions across years of DeFi activity and only 3 token approvals. Most active DeFi users accumulate 50 to 100+ approvals over that kind of history. Vitalik apparently revokes or limits approvals consistently.
Ethereum Foundation — 1/10
3,226 transactions. 0 approvals. 1 unverified contract. Perfectly clean institutional wallet, expected honestly.
Coinbase wallet — 1/10
10,000 transactions. 0 approvals. 0 unverified contracts. The cleanest wallet in the entire sample, not even a single approval granted across 10,000 transactions. This is what a pure custody wallet must be.
Binance hot wallet — 3/10
10,000 transactions. 0 approvals. 122 unverified contracts. No approval risk at all, but 122 interactions with contracts outside our 209,000 contract database. Exchange wallets touch everything including niche contracts nobody has catalogued yet.
Binance cold wallet — 6/10
10,000 transactions. 0 approvals. 299 unverified contracts. Higher score than the hot wallet despite being a cold storage address, purely because of the volume of unverified contract interactions. Exchanges interact with the long tail of DeFi at a scale most individual wallets never approach.
Active DeFi user — 8/10
502 transactions. 1 unlimited approval to an unknown spender. 12 unverified contracts. This is the most important data point in the entire sample. The highest risk wallet had the fewest transactions. One unlimited approval to an unrecognized contract address is all it takes to score 8/10. That approval means an unknown contract has permission to drain the entire token balance at any time.
Early ETH adopter — 2/10
599 transactions. 0 approvals. 0 unverified contracts. Clean on approvals but a 34% transaction failure rate, must be someone who experimented heavily in early Ethereum when failed transactions were common.
Curve liquidity pool — 1/10
10,000 transactions. 0 approvals. 0 unverified contracts. Protocol-operated wallets are consistently clean, they're designed to interact with specific known contracts only.
Three things this data taught me
1. Risk isn't about how much you use crypto.
The highest risk wallet in this sample had 502 transactions. The lowest risk wallets had 10,000+. Volume doesn't determine risk. What you approved does. This matters because most people assume experienced DeFi users are safer. The data doesn't support that. An experienced user who gave one unlimited approval to a sketchy contract years ago and forgot about it is more exposed than a careful newcomer who never approved anything they didn't understand.
2. One approval is enough.
The active DeFi wallet scored 8/10 with a single unlimited approval to an unknown spender. That's it. One transaction, years ago, that granted unlimited access to a token balance. The wallet owner probably doesn't remember signing it. This is how most wallet drains happen. Not through hacking. Not through private key theft. Through approvals people forgot about.
3. Exchange wallets reveal a hidden pattern.
Binance's cold wallet scored 6/10 — not from approvals but from unverified contract interactions. Exchanges interact with the entire long tail of DeFi including contracts too obscure to be in any database. That's a different kind of risk profile than individual wallets but worth understanding.
What does your wallet look like?
Vitalik's wallet has 3 approvals after a decade of DeFi activity. Most regular users have far more than that, and most don't know what those approvals are connected to. The interesting thing about wallet risk is that it's almost entirely self-inflicted. Every approval was a transaction you signed. Every unknown contract interaction was a protocol you chose to use. The history is yours.
Which makes it worth knowing.
Free scan at scan.chlora.xyz, no wallet connection required.
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