I used to think proof of identity meant handing over everything. Passport. Address. Tax ID. The whole file. Just to prove one thing. That always felt wrong to me.
Sign Protocol is doing something different. You prove what's needed. Nothing more. Age? Proved. Citizenship? Proved. Eligibility? Proved. But the rest stays with you.
That's not a minor UX improvement. That's a fundamentally different relationship between a person and a system. Most people won't notice when it works. That's actually the point. Invisible infrastructure doesn't announce itself. It just quietly stops failing you.
We're early. The selective disclosure architecture is solid on paper and showing up in real deployments. But "early" means the hard problems who governs the trust registry, who audits the issuers are still being answered in real time.
I'm watching that closely. Not because I expect it to collapse. Because the answer to those questions determines whether this becomes infrastructure or just another attestation experiment nobody remembers in three years.
The tech is there. The governance is the real test.