Sign Protocol: Attest with No Limits TODAY

Every day, we are faced with a miscellany of claims and assertions made by various entities in the real world and on the web that we have to work with. Typically, we resort to the classic trust assumptions and relationships of the systems we operate in, such as an entity being honest, or an authority, to establish confirmation of such claims. Sign Protocol offers a suite of tools, infrastructure, and standards to create a unified future where all claims and assertions on the web and the world around us are driven by verifiable attestations on any blockchain.

We have posted numerous articles in the past weeks that outlined the high-level core concepts of Sign Protocol but starting from this moment, you get to experience it yourself first hand. Before you dive into sign.global, let’s go over some of our technical highlights.

Attest with No Size Limits

We have accumulated a great deal of valuable experience on building applications that utilize Arweave as a decentralised storage solution from the development of EthSign Next, and all of that has been iterated upon once more in the development of Sign Protocol.

For starters, Sign Protocol offers two data publishing modes:

• On-chain mode, which utilizes blockchains for the robust guarantees of their storage protocols, such as data availability and global consensus for history-keeping and state tracking. Sign Protocol will have support for EVM-based chains on launch, followed by integration with non-EVM chains, including Starknet, Solana, and TON. This mode publishes attestations via smart contracts which in so doing, make the attestations trivially composable with numerous other smart contracts on the same chain. It’s important to note that depending on the blockchain being utilized, the costs for publishing attestation data on-chain may be prohibitively high due to the scarcity and high demand for block space on that particular chain.
• Off-chain mode, which leverages data storage solutions for storing attestation data. Sign Protocol will be using the Arweave platform for this purpose. This mode is often cheaper than the on-chain mode, by up to 1000 times, as solutions like Arweave are purposely designed to offer abundant bandwidth provisions dedicated to data storage. Thus, they can offer significant cost savings to store a unit of data.

For our technical readers out there, you might be wondering how is it possible at all for attestations made on Arweave to be read by on-chain smart contracts. Well, keep reading…

Attest with No Platform Limits

In on-chain data publishing mode, Sign Protocol is designed to be a chain-agnostic protocol, just like EthSign Next. This means that Sign Protocol can be natively implemented and operated on just about any conventional blockchain system. Additionally, in off-chain data publishing mode, Sign Protocol has been designed to offer cross-platform extensibility via Arweave. This means that attestation data stored on Arweave can be accessed by users and services from any other platform, especially blockchain systems like Ethereum, Polygon, Zetachain, and many others.

Algorithm-agnostic Consent

In off-chain mode, Sign Protocol supports ANY form of consent generated by ANY algorithm, as long as they can be independently verified. Unlike Solidity which only supports secp256k1 ECDSA or other blockchains that only support EdDSA, Sign Protocol can easily add support for secp256r1 ECDSA (which is used in Android and iOS devices), RSA (which is used in many traditional web2 systems), and more. Aside from digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs and TLS-MPC computations are also valid forms of consent that we work with. Whatever kind of proof that you have, whatever signing algorithm you use, whatever chain you’re natively on, we can get it done.

Verifiable Consent Bridging

Sign Protocol offers verifiable consent bridging that enables schemas and attestations to be freely bridged between all supported chains, including Arweave. For example, if you attested on Arweave but want to move your consent to other chains for the sake of smart contract interoperability, we can get it done. Actually, scratch that — we don’t get it done, YOU get it done! By adding support for independent witnesses, in the future there is no need to go through us to bridge your data at all.

Attest with No Gas Limits

We are here to augment your on-chain attestations with Arweave and off-chain datastore. If your attestation data size results in skyrocketing gas fees, simply offload it to Arweave or IPFS* with our help and store a lightweight CID instead. Sign Protocol schemas and attestations have built-in indicators that make it clear where data should be fetched from. If you are not a fan of decentralized storage or have data custody restrictions, we also support unchecked custom storage locations.

*IPFS storage cannot be considered permanent.

Attest with No Privacy Limits

We have brought over the work done on encryption in EthSign Next to Sign Protocol. That’s right — Sign Protocol makes use of EthSign Password Manager to make passwordless private attestations possible on public blockchains. Make the contents of your attestation visible to nobody but specified recipients with a single click, only at Sign Protocol.

The Sky is not the Limit

In on-chain mode, Sign Protocol gives schema builders the ability to add a hook contract which is called with every attestation and revocation made based on that schema. Hooks open the door to countless ways of extending the functionality of Sign Protocol. We gained a great deal of inspiration regarding hooks from their introduction and use in Uniswap V4.

In Conclusion

EthSign is proud to usher in a new era of Verifiable Trust for trust systems across the web and the world around us through attestations.

With the launch of Sign Protocol, we are excited to have you all explore and utilize it, and we can’t wait to see the effective attestations you’ll make, with no limits.