This afternoon, I pulled the deployment data of Sign Protocol on more than a dozen heterogeneous chains and found an extremely painful engineering deadlock: the cost black hole of cross-chain indexing. Now the whole network is reaching a narrative climax for Sign's 'full-chain identity map', believing that as long as contracts are deployed across all mainstream public chains, the super passport of Web3 has been built. However, when I tried to cross-chain fetch the comprehensive reputation score of a test address using their SDK, not only was the delay outrageous, but the underlying calls were also made to several highly centralized indexing nodes.
I did some calculations: writing an attestation on-chain is indeed extremely cheap, but to maintain a decentralized global state indexing network with millisecond-level response across chains with completely different architectures like Ethereum, Solana, and TON, the monthly hardware and bandwidth costs are astronomical. Currently, the officials are subsidizing the query layer out of their own pockets, but once they throw this cost onto decentralized nodes in the future, nodes will inevitably demand massive $SIGN issuance as compensation; however, if the cost is passed on to downstream DeFi protocols calling the data, the high 'cross-chain query fee' will directly force them back into Web2's centralized databases.
I am currently not concerned at all about which new public chain they announce they have integrated; I am just fixated on one action: when will Sign successfully run a 'data query charging model' that truly generates positive cash flow. If this inverted issue of 'cheap to write data, bankrupt to read data' is not resolved, the more public chains are laid out, the faster the bleeding will occur. I tell myself: don't be fooled by the grand and complete ecological map; the cross-chain infrastructure that cannot calculate the bandwidth costs is essentially just doing free labor for AWS, and the bottomless pit is still very deep.