Wallet Connection Standards
How a website talks to your wallet, what it can see, and what connecting actually grants.
Connecting a wallet to a site is the first step in most on-chain activity and it is widely misunderstood.
What connecting grants
Your address. The site can see which addresses you have shared and everything those addresses hold or have done, because that is public.
The ability to request signatures. The site can ask you to sign transactions and messages.
That is the whole list. Connecting does not grant permission to move anything.
What it does not grant
Spending. A site cannot take funds by being connected. Every movement requires a signature from you.
Your keys. These never leave the wallet.
Persistent authority, unless you grant it by signing an approval.
Where the danger actually is
Not in connecting. In what you sign afterwards.
Token approvals grant a contract permission to move a specific token from your address, and they do not expire.
Permit signatures grant the same thing without an on-chain transaction, costing no gas and appearing less consequential.
Transactions that do something other than what the interface claims.
The connection methods
Browser extension injection. The site talks directly to an extension. Standard for desktop.
Connection protocols using a QR code or deep link. Standard for pairing a mobile wallet with a desktop site. The session persists until revoked.
Hardware wallet through an extension. The extension is the interface; the device signs. The safest common arrangement, because the device screen shows what is being signed independently of the computer.
The hygiene
Review connected sites periodically. Most wallets list them. Disconnect anything you are not using.
Review approvals separately. Disconnecting a site does not revoke approvals it holds. These are different things and the second is what matters.
Use a separate wallet for connecting, holding a small balance, with long-term holdings in a wallet that has never connected to anything.
That last point is the structural defence and it is why we repeat it. A signature can only reach what the signing address holds or has approved.
The practical summary
Connecting is low risk. Signing is where everything happens.
Read what you are signing, prefer wallets that simulate and decode, and keep the connecting wallet small. The balance at venues supporting external addresses cannot be reached by any signature at all, which is why the working tier lives there rather than in a hot wallet.
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