Review an Exact Token Approval Before Signing

Identify the permission tuple

ERC-20 defines allowances involving an owner and spender, and an approve operation sets the spender’s permitted amount. The token contract and chain establish which asset and network that permission concerns. Review all of these fields together. An allowance for one contract is not proof of permission for a different token with the same ticker.

Compare the amount with the intention

For an illustrative workflow that intends to spend 3 tokens, an approval for 3 tokens and an unlimited approval represent different permissions. Check the displayed human-readable amount against the token’s decimals and inspect the underlying value when your wallet makes it available. If you cannot understand the requested limit, stop the review. A large value should not be accepted solely because a website calls it a routine setup step.

Verify the spender independently

The approval spender may be a contract rather than the website’s address or the token’s own address. Compare it with the intended protocol’s official deployment documentation on the selected chain. If the identity cannot be established, do not infer trust from a recognizable contract label. This page deliberately supplies no spender to approve and does not request a signature.

Check the outcome separately

A confirmed approval does not prove a swap was sent or that output tokens arrived. Record the approval transaction hash and permission scope separately from any later exchange transaction. Existing permissions may persist after a website session ends. If you later choose to change a permission, independently review that request and its network cost; this guide does not submit it.

References and verification

Content reviewed on 10 November 2026. Product observations describe the inspected public interface; external references explain the underlying concepts.

• ERC-20 specification: approve and allowance