Mastering Crypto

The first reason @SignOfficial didn't immediately get on my radar is the same reason most infrastructure projects get ignored by me. All these sound significant on paper, though in the reality, they are a set of tools that will simply matter within crypto. Useful, maybe. Essential, rarely. The more I examined what $SIGN is positioning itself to do in fact, the less I could consider it merely a layer within the company.
Not only because this is no longer about crypto. Something larger is imperceptibly moving.
It is a wider issue, years in the making, and related to blockchain. The trust models most commonly used in the vast majority of public systems are suited to slower, more centralized environments. It all hinges on institutions checking claims and relaying information to one another in terms of identity, payments, eligibility, compliance, and so on. It functions, but is disjointed, slow and can be difficult to audit in real time. The more digital everything gets, the more that friction begins to manifest itself.
That is where the concept of the public infrastructure that goes on-chain begins to make sense. Not as a fashion; but as a reaction. When systems are required to validate claims between systems, across boundaries, and across platforms, then a common, provable layer begins to become optional, less or more essential.
This is precisely where $SIGN places itself but it does not do this noisily. It sneaks in via an easier concept. Verification. In a more precise way, transforming claims into something provable, the one that can be stored and reused in various systems. Sign Protocol is the central component of this and is an omni-chain attestation layer. It enables the recording of data, be it identity, agreements or eligibility to be documented as verifiable evidences rather than assumptions.
The fact that it verifies things does not make it different, but the way it approaches verification. Rather than a single check that is made once within one system, it is portable. A claim may be established, and be referred to under any other place which acknowledges the reference. That is little but it is making systems interact in a different way. You no longer have to recreating trust. You're reusing it.
SIGN works on a number of layers, if you break it down. Technically, it brings the attestations in the form of structured records, on-chain. They are basically evidence associated with an issuer, which can be verified in the future without returning to the source once again. This can then be extended by developers who determine schemas and conditions and develop systems in which access, rewards or actions are based on verified data rather than assumptions. As users, it changes subtly. They bring verifiable context with them as opposed to merely interacting with apps. Identity, history, eligibility, all reusable pieces and not solitary pieces.
However, it is not confined to credentials. SIGN ties this verification layer to distribution by use of such tools as TokenTable, where value is awarded on such proofs. This is where infrastructure to support crypto becomes less about infrastructure and more about infrastructure. Since you can verify and distribute in the same loop once, you are not necessarily recording activity. You're shaping outcomes.
Nevertheless, it is essential to remember to hold back and not get lost in the story. Much of actual usage of SIGN still resides within crypto. Airdrops, token distributions, incentives. It is more organized than we have ever seen before but it has not yet really entered into the habitat that it is targeting. Public infrastructure is the kind of big-sounding idea in question, but the test of it is whether institutions apply it to anything that matters.
That's where the gap sits.
On a loftier plane, however, the tendency is difficult to neglect. We are beginning to experience an end of isolated blockchain apps and systems that attempt to replicate or even replace real-life infrastructure. Identity systems, payment rails, layers of compliance. Even the more general vision of SIGN suggests deploying at the national scale, with money systems, identity systems, capital distributions, and so forth all linked together by a common point of verification.
I bet that it sounds like we have heard some versions of this before in the traditional systems. Something comparable happened to the internet, with the creation of the public key infrastructure that enabled the verification of identities and secured communication on a large scale. What SIGN is trying to do seems like a more programmable, on-chain evolution of that concept.
The distinction is that this time there is more than data security at stake. It has to do with making decisions on how the systems will run on that data.
It remains unknown whether that is indeed going to occur or not. Relocating social infrastructure is not an upgrade that is technical only. It is a change where regulation, trust and coordination among the entities that are not fast-paced take place. And the majority of projects do not go that far. They remain within crypto, perfect their models and ultimately level off.
SIGN has not gotten that far yet. It is in the stage where the idea outweighs the adoption.
However, when public infrastructure actually starts to trend this way, then measures such as this will not feel like an option very much longer. They will begin to resemble the strata of earth beneath which all things rest on.
And should that occur, SIGN will not have to make a hue and cry to be heard.
It will already be sitting dead in the middle of it.
#SignDigitalSovereignInfra

You have a point where you become no longer new in crypto.
Initially, all that appears to be innovation. New chains, new stories, new innovations. However, the more time you spend there the more you begin to know it. Not that nothing is happening, but that most of it is directed the same way.
It is development, but in an extremely limited scope.
And the things that cannot fit in that frame?
They tend to get ignored.
One of them is the actual behavior of data in real-world systems.
Crypto has years of optimization of speed, reduction of fees and throughput. Important work, no doubt. But all that was going on, even as it was, a more toned down problem had been lurking in the background.
How information is shared.
Even now, majority of the systems continue to compel an uncomplicated decision.
Bring out all to the open.
Or cover it up to keep secret.
That would be theory but hardly ever reality.
Since the real life interactions do not work in that way.
There is hardly ever all public and all private information. It's conditional. Contextual. Accessible to those who ought to look at it and why.
That is what @MidnightNetwork appears to be listening to.
It does not treat privacy as a bonus or a feature. Rather it considers it as structural. Something that influences the way the system is constructed at the very beginning.
The concept of selective disclosure, which operates on the power of zero-knowledge technology, is the core of this approach. It enables proving something without telling what the data is.
Therefore, rather than making a decision about transparency and confidentiality, the system allows you to decide what is disclosed in which case.
That change is slight, but it has an impact on the behavior of the whole network.
Technically Midnight is used to distinguish between public and private operations. Validation and consensus are done in the public layers. Sensitive data are carried out in private layers. This division does not put all the details in one model but rather is much more consistent with the way information moves beyond blockchain systems.
To the developers, this would provide another environment to develop.
Privacy is no longer an attempt to join on later. It is a component of the design itself. The developers can dictate which components of an application will be displayed, which will be hidden and which may be exposed in certain circumstances.
That flexibility has made it easy to open up use cases which have been hard to support to date. There may be systems that would need both verification and confidentiality though not necessarily at the expense of the other.
On the user side, it becomes less strict.
You are not compelled to go all the way to actually communicate with a network. Meanwhile, you are not working in an entirely opaque system in which trust is hard. It has a balance that is more in line with the natural approach to information management.
This thinking is even reflected upon the token structure.
Midnight separates value and usage as opposed to tying everything to a single asset that is used over time. The primary token is valuable whereas the secondary resource is utilized during transactions and regenerates. That lessens the incessant tension between being a part of the network and maintaining your status.
All this is not a guarantee of success.
And it can not be put in that light.
The fact is that, due to a plethora of projects that have presented powerful ideas that have never been endorsed to any significant adoption. Midnight yet needs to demonstrate that developers will code with this model, that users will in fact require this degree of control and that the system can scale reliably.
What it is doing differently is however difficult to overlook.
It is not attempting to answer the most evident issues.
It is targeting the ones that have been shied away.
And as you zoom out, then that is where the larger picture begins to establish itself.
It has taken years to enhance the speed of the movement of data within the industry.
Midnight is questioning the manner in which data is dealt with.
And not only movement, but exposure.
Not just access, but control.
That is another strata of the problem.
And perhaps that is why it does not seem to fit in with everything.
In a marketplace that enjoys seeing visible good things, Midnight is engaged in having something less visible, yet possibly more fundamental.
The question of whether or not that direction becomes fundamental or remains a niche remains unanswered.
At present, however, it is one of the few projects not to be merely doing an improvement job on what is already there.
It is listening to what all the other people chose not to listen to.
$NIGHT #night