Introduction
Bringing trust to trustless networks
Last updated
Bringing trust to trustless networks
Last updated
EthSign is bringing trust to trustless networks by connecting real-world legal agreements and decentralized identities. We provide the same functionality, user experience, and legal validity as Web 2.0 e-signing platforms while leveraging the power of public blockchains to enhance transparency and security. Users can upload documents, create signing fields, customize annotation objects like text fields and checkboxes, invite co-signers, track signing status, download documents, and view events of the entire agreement lifecycle.
Digital signatures on EthSign are generated with EIP-712 or equivalent standards and written into the documents.
Industry-leading keyless encryption means you never have to remember any document passwords again, even applying retroactively to past documents once the user has enabled advanced encryption for their address.
EthSign complies with mainstream nations’ digital signature laws and signatures can be verified publicly at zero cost.
From its inception, one of the most substantial problems facing the Web3 industry has been the fragmentation and siloing of different blockchain systems. Even for veteran users, switching between blockchains is an annoying process, not to mention blockchains built on different virtual machines require different wallets to access. On top of that, universal data interoperability is nonexistent between blockchains.
Therefore, to break the chain barrier, we must end the reliance on smart contracts. This is not to say things are any less decentralized – we keep decentralization by flipping the data verification workflow though lazy verification, meaning data integrity is validated by the user's browser indepedently when it's loaded instead of when it's stored. As a result of this paradigm shift, we now support multiple wallets from multiple blockchains interacting with each other on EthSign. Signing a cross-chain agreement between Bitcoin, EVM, TON, and Solana users is becoming a reality.
We have added optional email and Telegram notifications to EthSign. Worry not, we never store any user information or telemetry unless it is necessary for the application to function properly. Email addresses and Telegram handles, for example, do not persist server-side and are automatically discarded once the notifications are sent out. Your document and signing data never leave your browser unencrypted unless you explicitly consent to bypass our industry-standard AES-256-GCM and ECIES encryption. We take privacy and data security extremely seriously – our business model does not and will never involve selling any raw or derived user data.
One of the major complaints of previous versions of EthSign was the speed (or lack thereof) of the interactions and the fact that random errors caused by faulty RPCs would stop users from completing their tasks. This is not only frustrating for the users but for us as well, since these errors are caused by factors outside our control. By embracing the aforementioned verification model, we have moved away from smart contracts and replaced them with an open-source backend on AWS, resulting in the total elimination of any wallet errors and extra wait time. Taking complete technical ownership and control of the entire workflow also eliminates our inability to fix certain errors. Combined with front-end optimizations, CDNs, and edge servers, this is our most performant version of EthSign to date.
Inarguably, two of the most important questions in the industry are “wen token” and “how centralized is this product”. With our previous talk regarding the use of AWS, it is only reasonable to raise some questions about our engineering practices in EthSign. Have we finally taken the red pill and gone down the rabbit hole of centralization since some think ordinary users don’t know any better or actually care? For the longest time, we have struggled with striking the right balance between decentralization and usability. A product cannot be so decentralized that we become a hostage to the various tech stacks we utilize that are completely out of our control, but it also cannot be so centralized that if the platform unexpectedly terminates service, all historical user data is lost or obfuscated.
In EthSign, we decided to adopt the practice of decentralized settlement. Any documents still being signed are stored centrally to improve user experience while those that have completed the signing process (settled contracts) are automatically submitted to Arweave at no cost to the user. Of course, regardless of the storage location, we fully respect and enforce the encryption rules set by the user. If the document is encrypted, nobody outside the intended group of recipients can decrypt the document, not even us.
We also took steps to make sure our users can still access their signed documents and cryptographic proof-of-consent even if we are gone. Once your documents have been permanently stored on Arweave, you no longer need us to access them and their respective metadata. You can easily index, decrypt, parse, and verify all your completed documents via an open-source tool that we will release later this year. Don’t trust us – trust the code.
