How to Make a Monthly Wallet Security Review
A repeatable monthly review for permissions, devices, bookmarks and recovery notes.
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A monthly wallet review is not a security ritual invented to make you feel careful. It exists because the things that endanger a wallet are not fixed events with an announcement — they are permissions granted months ago, an extension installed in March, a recovery note that stopped matching reality after you restored a backup on a new device. None of them trigger an alert the day they become dangerous. All of them are visible if you look on a schedule.
The reason to fix the schedule in advance is that the moment you most need this information is the moment you are least able to process it. Someone who has just seen an unexpected token approval, or who has been messaged by “support” asking for a phrase, is exactly the person who should not be reconstructing which contracts they signed six months ago. Doing the review while things are calm turns a scramble into a lookup.
What actually changes on a monthly cadence
Four things drift, and only four things drift.
Active approvals. Every interaction with a DeFi protocol can leave behind a token approval — a permission for a contract to move a named amount of a named asset on your behalf. Most wallets will let you set a spend limit rather than an unlimited one, and most protocols do not require unlimited. These accumulate silently: a swap here, a staking deposit there, a liquidity position that has been closed for eight months but whose approval never was. This is the single largest category of dormant exposure on a typical wallet, and it is the only category where a monthly pass consistently finds something.
The recovery path. Whether the seed phrase or private key backup still corresponds to something you actually hold, in a form you can read today, is a question with a slow decay. Wallets get replaced. Devices get wiped. A backup taken eighteen months ago may belong to an account that no longer exists. The failure mode here is not theft, it is discovering during an emergency that your recovery material does not work.
Installed extensions and connected apps. Browser extensions update themselves automatically. An extension that was harmless when you installed it can ship different code in a later version, and by default most extensions request permission to read and change site data — which is enough to intercept what a wallet extension displays. The risk is not that every extension is hostile; it is that you have no way to tell which ones are, so the count itself matters.
Bookmark and domain hygiene. The saved links you use to reach a protocol’s own site are the fastest route to it and also the least examined. A mistyped bookmark or a search-ad landing page puts a lookalike domain exactly where a legitimate one should be.
The thirty-minute procedure
- Open your wallet’s own interface, not a link. Enter through the application itself or a domain you have verified before. Everything in this review depends on you being in the real interface.
- Confirm which account you are reviewing. Wallets routinely hold several. Reviewing the wrong account produces a correct answer to the wrong question, and it is the most common way people conclude “I’m fine” while the account they actually use is exposed.
- Export the approval list and sort by last use. Anything not used in months is a candidate for revocation regardless of how familiar the project name looks.
- Revoke first, re-approve later. Revocation is itself a transaction with a cost, so it is not free — but re-approving is a transaction you choose to make, while a standing unlimited approval is a decision you made once and forgot. Most wallets expose a batch revoke for this reason.
- Test the recovery phrase without exposing it. Verify that a backup exists, that it is stored somewhere you control, and that you can read it. Never type it into a website, never photograph it, never paste it into a support chat. If you cannot confirm it is intact, treat that as the finding of the month.
- Read the extension list and remove what you do not recognise. Anything you cannot name the purpose of goes. Extensions installed to do a task you finished are pure exposure.
- Check the bookmark set against the domains you actually visit. Replace any entry you cannot match to a protocol you consciously chose.
- Write down what changed, with a date. An unrecorded review cannot be distinguished from one that never happened.
Judging what you find
Not every finding is urgent, and treating everything as urgent is how reviews get abandoned. A useful triage separates exposure that is standing from exposure that is being used.
An unlimited approval to a contract you actively swap through is standing exposure with a known counterparty. An unlimited approval to a contract you used once, months ago, for a protocol you no longer follow, is standing exposure with an unknown one — the difference matters because you cannot reason about code you have stopped tracking. An unexpected approval that appeared without an action of yours is not standing exposure at all, and it deserves the shortest possible path to a decision.
The distinction to hold onto: on-chain state tells you what permissions exist, never what anyone intends to do with them. A permission screen is a list of what is permitted, not a report of an attack in progress.
What a monthly review cannot do
It cannot tell you whether a contract you have approved is secure. It cannot tell you whether an address you have interacted with is controlled by someone honest. It cannot recover funds from an irreversible transaction — a transaction sent on Ethereum cannot be undone unless the recipient chooses to send it back.
It also cannot become a ritual that replaces judgement. The point of the schedule is that it catches drift you would not otherwise notice, and every item on the list above is a thing that changed without telling you.