Finding and revoking what you have already approved

If you've used crypto for a while, you have approvals you've forgotten. Every exchange, every marketplace, every “connect to claim” page left one behind. They don't expire, and nothing reminds you they're there.

Here's the part that isn't obvious. The risk isn't fixed at the moment you approve. A contract that was safe in 2023 can be broken into in 2026, and your approval still stands. You're exposed to the future security of every contract you've ever allowed, for as long as the allowance lasts.

Seeing them is easy. A block explorer or an approval-checker tool takes your address and lists which contracts can move which tokens, and how much. That's a read — the same kind Aureus does — so looking costs nothing and risks nothing.

Removing one is different. Revoking is a transaction. You're writing to the chain to set that allowance back to zero, so it needs a signature from your wallet and it costs a network fee.

Two honest consequences. It isn't free, so clearing dozens of stale approvals costs real money — start with the large allowances and the contracts you don't recognise. And because it needs your wallet, the revoke step is itself a target. Fake “revoke your approvals” sites exist, and they ask you to approve something rather than revoke anything.

Aureus renders no button for any of this. We could show you your approvals — that's only a read — but revoking needs a wallet connection, and a flow that ends in a popup from us is the thing we've decided not to build. So this happens somewhere else, with a tool you chose, after you've checked its address the way the next article describes.