Work / Live

Your wallet shows hex. Cleartext shows a sentence.

People empty their own wallets by approving requests they cannot read. Cleartext intercepts the signing request, translates what it actually does into plain English, and lets you reject it before you click.

Scope
Product and extension
Surface
Web plus Chrome
Status
Live
Adds
0.4s to signing
Cleartext translating signing requests, including a high-risk one that moves funds out of the wallet
Four real request types, translated. The third is the one that matters: a request presented as a claim that actually moves money out.

The problem

A wallet signing request is a wall of hexadecimal. The person approving it has no way to tell a routine swap from a contract that can drain the account with no time limit. Wallets do show a warning, but then they show the same two buttons as always, which leaves the decision exactly where it started.

The loss is not discovered at the moment of signing. It is discovered weeks later.

The insight

The failure is not carelessness, it is legibility. People are being asked to make a security decision from data written for machines.

Which meant the product could not be another warning layer. It had to do the reading and state the consequence in a sentence, with the risky case phrased as plainly as the harmless one. “This is not a claim. It moves $13,797 out of your wallet” is a decision. A red triangle is not.

It also had to stay out of the way. Anything that replaced someone’s existing wallet would not get installed, so Cleartext sits in front of the one they already use and adds fractions of a second.

What we built

A decoder anyone can try

A web surface that translates a pasted request immediately, with no wallet connection and nothing to install, so the idea can be evaluated in seconds.

A Chrome extension for real use

It intercepts the request, translates it, and offers reject or continue. Continue hands straight back to MetaMask, Rabby, Phantom, Coinbase Wallet, Trust, or Ledger.

Honest failure states

When a request cannot be simulated, it says so and marks it unverified rather than guessing. A tool that quietly gets one wrong is worse than no tool.

  • Nothing unusual: stated plainly, no alarm
  • Check this: unusual permissions, spelled out
  • High risk: the actual amount leaving, in dollars
  • Could not verify: admitted rather than assumed

Where it stands

Live at cleartextapp.vercel.app, working alongside the six wallets most people already use.

Client quote goes here. Ask for two sentences on what changed after launch, then replace this block. A named quote with a company beats an anonymous one, but an anonymous specific quote still beats nothing.