Friendly advice. Revoke your token approvals NOW!

By now you have all heard about the multi chain hack. You remember the sushi swap hack and so many others that are more r less popular depending what you do and where you are from. The big take away from this post is what are you signing with you wallet. Wait. What have you signed with your wallet maybe years ago that you may have forgotten. Maybe that old sketchy NFt project that vanished or a token you wanted to degen into on Dex tools. What about some shady defi protocols you saw listed on a discord maybe refereed by friends and so n. Where would you go to see what permissions you gave and might still be active putting you at risk of having your wallet drained and your dreams of generational wealth vanish in a blink of an eye? Enter Revoke cash.

Revoke Cash will reverse all token approvals you have authorized over time. Unfortunately they can't be lumped into one transaction so you will need to do one x one and of curse pay the gwei at whatever rate it is at the moment.

What Are Token Approvals?

Token approvals are used to give permission to a smart contract to spend your tokens on your behalf. This is a common pattern used by decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and other decentralized applications. For example, if you want to trade your tokens on a decentralized exchange, you will need to give the exchange permission to Swap those tokens on your behalf.

Token approvals are also used with NFTs. For example, if you want to sell your NFT on a marketplace, you will need to give the marketplace permission to transfer your NFT on your behalf. Or if you want to use your NFT as collateral for a loan, you will need to give the lending protocol permission to transfer your NFT on your behalf.

How Do Token Approvals Work?

In most smart contracts of standard fungible tokens and NFTs, there is a mapping that keeps track of all the approvals that a user has granted, who they have granted it to, and how much / which assets they have granted the approval for. Whenever you grant or revoke one of these approvals, this mapping is updated.

When a contract tries to spend your tokens on your behalf, the token's smart contract then checks this mapping to see if the spender has permission to spend the tokens. If it does, the tokens are spent. If it does not, the transaction fails.

Risks of Token Approvals

Token approvals are a core part of the smart contract ecosystem. Without them, a lot of DeFi applications would not be possible. But there are also risks to token approvals. If you give a smart contract permission to spend your tokens, it can spend them at any time. So if the smart contract is hacked or malicious, your tokens can be stolen.

Smart Contract Exploits

One of the risks of token approvals is that the smart contract you are granting approval to can be hacked. Even established projects can become the victim of a hack, as we saw with the sushiswap exploit in April 2023. In these cases, hackers may be able to steal tokens from your wallet if you've given any approvals to the hacked smart contract.

Now you know a little bit more about how easily these tragedies can happen and YES they can happen to anyone so be always be alert but most importantly I implore you go to the revoke site soon and see what approvals you have wide open and revoke them sooner than later. It will be worth it. I promise you.

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