Study of 85 Crypto Wallet Extensions Finds Address Leaks and Cross-Site Tracking Risks
Jul 14, 2026
Cryptocurrency / Identity Protection
Researchers at KU Leuven tested 85 of the most popular crypto wallets that run as browser extensions and found that the wallets themselves leak enough to link and track the people using them. The way these wallets talk to websites and blockchain servers can tie a person's separate addresses together and let outsiders follow them from site to site. And on a site that already holds a name or email, the same leaks can put a real name to an "anonymous" crypto identity. This is not a hack. The wallets behave exactly as they were built to. The 85 extensions together have about 35 million users listed on the Chrome Web Store. The team, from the university's DistriNet security group, posted the paper this month and will present it at the PETS 2026 privacy conference in Calgary in late July. They ran real wallets against real Web3 sites and mapped out five privacy weaknesses in how wallets and websites interact. When they reported the most far-reaching one to the wa...
