A recent incident occurred in the company where a colleague wrote that they had a 985 undergraduate degree upon joining, but after more than half a year, HR found out during the verification that it was actually a junior college degree.

However, this kind of thing is probably encountered by any company. At that time, the first thought that came to my mind was that if the academic certificate could be verified on-chain, this kind of incident would never happen.


This is@SignOfficial SIGN is doing attestation, simply put, it is on-chain proof. Someone verifies a piece of information you have with a signature, and this verification is recorded on the chain, which can be checked by anyone and cannot be tampered with.

Degree, work experience, qualifications, health certificates; theoretically, anything that needs to verify authenticity can be handled with this mechanism.


I think this direction indeed has real demand.

What is the current academic verification process like? HR either calls the school, checks the academic verification network, or entrusts a third-party background check company. Each time they hire someone, they go through this, which is neither low-cost nor efficient.

Moreover, the academic verification network only covers domestic degrees, and verifying degrees for returnees is more complicated. They have to go through the study abroad service center for certification, which has a long cycle and complicated processes. If these things become on-chain attestations, when schools issue certificates, they could conveniently do an on-chain certification, and later anyone who wants to verify can just scan it directly, saving all intermediary steps.


It's not just about academic qualifications. Faking health certificates, faking professional qualifications, or even inflating work experience on resumes are fundamentally the same issue: there is a lack of a low-cost, tamper-proof channel between the issuer of the information and the verifier. The attestation protocol is working on creating this channel.


But thinking about this, I calmed down a bit.

Having the right direction is one thing; being able to push it forward is another. Are schools willing to issue certificates on-chain? Are hospitals willing to adopt attestation to issue health certificates? These institutions haven't even sorted out their own digitization; how can we expect them to connect with a Web3 protocol? Where is the motivation?

#Sign地缘政治基建 We have now signed collaborations with Sierra Leone, Kyrgyzstan, and Abu Dhabi, taking the government route and trying to push from the B-end and G-end. This path is not impossible, but the cycle is long, and from the perspective of ordinary users, in the short term, they still cannot feel the existence of attestation in daily life.


I actually think there is a scenario that might land more quickly: internal attestation within Web3. Project parties certifying the identities of early contributors, DAO voting qualification certification, on-chain credit records. These scenarios do not need to deal with traditional institutions; they are purely closed-loop on the chain, making it much easier to push forward. However, it's hard to say how high the ceiling for this market is.


$SIGN The current price is around $0.051, and it recently rebounded, but it has still dropped more than 60% from last year's high of 0.13.

Price is one thing; the direction of attestation itself is one of the few tracks in Web3 that has real connections to the real world. Whether it can be successful depends not on the direction but on execution speed and promotional capabilities.

The colleague was later dismissed. If there had been an unalterable academic certification system at the time, he might have given up on faking it even when submitting his resume. This incident is quite interesting to think about 😂.


Personal opinion, not investment advice!