Sign CEO: Tell stories everyone can understand

Author: Xin Yan, Co-Founder and CEO of Sign

Sign will be four years old in a few months. Time flies so fast. We have grown from a simple hackathon idea to a team with multiple business lines, with revenue and financing exceeding tens of millions each. We have witnessed the changes and growth of ourselves and the industry. In the process, we have spent millions of dollars iterating on products to find PMF (at a macro level, venture capital funds have also invested tens of billions to find PMF for crypto). Today we mainly write about the changes and opinions we have personally experienced.

When I joined the circle around 2018, the crypto community was very Cypherpunk, and I liked learning about cryptography, blockchain consensus algorithms, the performance of different virtual machines, etc. At that time, we believed that the main reason why crypto was not widely used was that the infrastructure was not good enough. Later, around 21 years ago, we had many fast and cheap public chains available, and the main narrative of the industry became the Web3 revolution. Web3 is a new generation of the Internet. We want to reconstruct the entire network on the blockchain (our first application EthSign was also started based on this idea). The idea itself is radical and straightforward, that is, we use the blockchain standard (public and private key) system to rebuild all applications, we turn many SaaS into protocols and provide free and reliable services to users around the world.

But in reality, the popularity of Web3 is not as fast as we imagined. From personal experience, friends outside the circle have not continued to Onboard Web3 in the past few years. The best outcome for startups in this track is to find loyal users in a small group (EthSign’s current main users come from countries such as Indonesia, Turkey and Nigeria where electronic signature penetration is not high but Crypto-friendly), and there are many more It has given up on its ideals and was acquired by the Web2 company.

The popularity of Web3 and Crypto has not been as smooth as expected. I think there are the following reasons:

1. Does not provide new functions or user experience. Most Web3 products try to replicate the functionality of competing Web2 products, with an emphasis on security and privacy. But the reality is that most users don’t care about data privacy that much, or they don’t trust laws and regulations.

2. The most basic data of the entire industry, the number of wallets has not grown exponentially, which limits the network effect of the entire Web3. Although email and crypto wallet are both anonymous electronic identities, users still prefer to use the former because it is more familiar to everyone.

Web3 requires users to take responsibility for everything from the beginning (24 words that must be remembered and kept secret) without providing a user experience that is 10 times better than existing applications, new features, or huge economic incentives that can be sustained. ), it will inevitably scare novice users who just want to get on the bus.

Mnemonic Phrase: If you let anyone else see this, you will lose everything!

3. Compliance. In essence, the capabilities provided by Web3 are ahead of the existing system and are difficult to obtain regulatory support. For example, we all know the value of peer-to-peer transfers around the world, but this easily implemented function is completely incompatible with the current mainstream anti-money laundering framework, and it is difficult for Crypto payments to be integrated into mainstream applications.

Since our attempt to hard sell/fomo the whole world to onboard Web3 failed, we should choose a more conservative and moderate approach and wrap Web3 into different conceptually simple and easy products. This year’s most successful examples all have this in common:

1. Bitcoin ETF. It is by no means Satoshi Nakamoto’s Vision, but it does effectively bring Bitcoin into mainstream society. The controversy surrounding this matter reminds me of the issue of film and television adaptations of excellent literary works. Some people will always say that works that become filmed and television have lost the spirit of the original works, but objectively speaking, film and television has lowered the threshold and made it accessible to more mainstream people. Access to the original work. Bitcoin ETFs eliminate many problems such as custody responsibilities and investment category restrictions for traditional capital, truly bringing Bitcoin to the mainstream.

2.TON. TON is the blockchain native to Telegram's ecosystem and is an important part of Telegram's goal of becoming a global Superapp. Telegram users are scattered in different countries. The cost of establishing cooperation with all banks through Wechat Pay or Paypal is far higher than running a blockchain. As long as Telegram users can onboard TON, peer-to-peer transfers will be easily achieved. However, the first ecological project to achieve the goal of large-scale onboarding users is not DeFi or NFT, but an application with only one button, Notcoin.

Notcoin just has a giant button

Notcoin is an application that does not require documentation or introduction. In the early days, users only needed to point their fingers to get Notcoin airdrops in their wallets (Notcoin transformed into a traffic distribution platform after TGE to divert traffic to other ecological projects). Notcoin opened up the Peercoin track, and together with other projects, introduced tens of millions of users to Web3 with minimal user education, allowing them to have interest-earning US dollar stablecoin accounts.

TokenTable is honored to serve most TON ecological projects, helping them distribute tokens to users, and also provides us with our main source of income this year. The success of TON is the most successful mass onboarding in the history of Crypto. Twenty million addresses were created within three months, but it may be because most of the users are from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and they did not get enough in the US-centered Crypto world. reports.

3.Pump.fun. Pump.fun may be the fastest company in the world to hit $100 million in revenue. It allows anyone to quickly and easily create a memecoin and prevents early rugs. This platform brings memecoin from the fringe to the mainstream, making memecoin a new means for users to participate in predicting changes in mainstream events or capture the value of various traffic. I don’t have data, but the first application of many friends who are new to Crypto is to buy memecoins on Pump.fun.

In the past year, I feel that the opinions of friends around me have divided into two distinct factions, or they have fled to both ends of the IQ curve. The IQ150 faction still insists on discussing how to make it faster and cheaper and continues to talk about the infrastructure for large-scale applications. story, while the other faction gives up on doing anything, believing that any product or even web page is redundant and only CA is meaningful.

We sit proudly and bravely on the middle curve, packaging new technologies into simple products, striving to connect more closely with the real world and gain funding and traffic. I think the industry has passed the era of selling concepts. The vast majority of people already understand crypto, but they just lack popular applications to pick them up. We are in the time window of mass onboarding. The infrastructure has been established. After that, it will be more like the application era of the Internet. Entrepreneurs need to find the right angle to attract and retain users.

This realization was painful. We launched Sign Protocol, an omni-chain attestation system, at the beginning of this year. But as you want to ask, what is attestation? This is a technical concept that takes us five minutes to explain. We want to establish standards for on-chain proof and verification of data, but most of the actual work is spent explaining technical concepts. So in the second half of the year, we began to promote applications based on Sign Protocol. For example, we built an ID system for Sierra Leone and ZuThailand that can be verified on the chain, and distributed and unlocked tokens TokenTable to users, which in turn promoted the popularity of Sign Protocol. We spent a lot of time learning a lesson that seems ridiculously simple in web2: sell features/experiences/services, don 't sell technology/standards.

Sign Protocol’s npm downloads: We didn’t promote it in the second half of the year, but the data is still very good

We are not a team satisfied with making demos to verify the feasibility. We hope to truly promote our products to be used by tens of millions of users and change their views on crypto. We will radically cooperate with the traditional world (in fact, they are not that traditional) and seek to bring already digitized information and trust to the deserted on-chain world. Although cyberspace is independent, it is not isolated from the real world. In the past few years, we have witnessed the development bottleneck of purely native projects on the chain because there is not enough data, information and applications on the chain. For example, on-chain lending cannot use the user's credit system in the real world and always requires users to make too much mortgage and cannot continue to develop.

In the future, we will focus on Mass Onboarding and use the latest technology (mainly zk) to allow more users to simply use crypto and enjoy the convenience. Our new products will solve the most fundamental problems: identity and trust.