Despite the ongoing regulatory crackdown on the crypto industry and the collapse of some of its children, the underlying decentralized technology continues to drive Internet incumbents into the web3 space.
Telegram and Line, two of the most popular messengers in the world with hundreds of millions of monthly users, have both integrated encryption features in recent months. One of the features introduced in these apps is electronic signature, which is powered by a startup called EthSign.
Backed by all three divisions of Sequoia — Sequoia Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Capital China (now called HongShan), Singapore-based EthSign aims to provide a web3 equivalent of DocuSign with the promise of an extra layer of transparency and trust . So his job is to convince the masses that signing contracts on the blockchain is superior to the traditional method.
“First, it’s much easier to authenticate each signatory party and see a history of their interaction with the signed document,” explained EthSign co-founder and CEO Xin Yan, who previously worked at the strategic investment arm. of the central stock exchange. Huobi.
If a traditional e-signature service provider shuts down, the record of users’ signatures will also be lost, a challenge unrelated to distributed ledger technology, Yan told TechCrunch. And once signed, the data is immutable, one of the most promising features of blockchain.
EthSign is developed on the respective blockchain network running on Telegram and Line, TON and Finschia. Once users connect their crypto wallets to messengers, they can start signing documents through EthSign the way they would interface with DocuSign.
EthSign has already been launched on Telegram as a mini-app, which can notify users of a list of pending documents for approval. Once a contract is opened, users will be prompted to connect their crypto wallets and scroll down to sign. At this point, EthSign will request access to users’ wallet addresses to create their blockchain-proof signatures. (Watch a demo of the feature below.)
EthSign is one of several web3 projects based on TON, Telegram’s blockchain partner helping the messenger work towards its vision of becoming a WeChat-like super app.
Already live on Line as a web app, EthSign has signed a memorandum of understanding with Finschia for further integration in the coming months.
The idea of enabling immutable signatures in messaging apps is not new. In 2018, a mini-app called “Little Protocol” was launched on the Chinese messaging giant WeChat. The feature, which allowed users to commit their WeChat IDs to the content of the document recorded in Ethereum, garnered over 100,000 hits overnight. Within 48 hours, however, the app was removed from WeChat.
To date, EthSign has connected to approximately 250,000 unique wallet addresses. It is still free to use, but it aims to become an attestation service platform in the future and charge for attestation, verification and other user activities, rather than following the traditional SaaS model of monetizing through subscription fees.
“Confirming information on-chain means bringing trust to the on-chain world, where the most promising use case is a vampire attack,” Yan explained, referring to the web3 phenomenon in which users are drawn into a forked version of an established encryption. project that offers enhanced incentives.
