A couple of days ago, I lost my ID card and went to the police station to get a replacement. A lady at the adjacent window really made me laugh.
She was helplessly negotiating with the police officer because in order to handle some business, she had to run around to several different government departments to get a pile of mutually verified documents, with the core request being just one: to prove that her mom is indeed her mom.
Everyone listening nearby smiled knowingly, but after laughing, it was actually quite bittersweet: it's already 2026, and common people have to expose their privacy and self-verify everything over again when dealing with different authorities or banks.
Looking at the lady's helpless back, I immediately thought of the recent discussions about Sign. Setting aside the grand narratives, its underlying verifiable credential (VC) mechanism aims to solve the frustrating pain point of “repeated self-verification.”
Let’s objectively break down its combination: DID + VC + ZK.
Its design is very ingenious. As long as an authoritative institution (like the police system or a major bank) has verified you once, it will issue you an encrypted credential. This credential only exists in your self-managed wallet. The next time you go to another department to handle business, you don’t need to resubmit that pile of household registration copies; you can simply use ZK (zero-knowledge proof) to provide a mathematical proof.
The other system can instantly confirm “this is indeed her mom,” but it doesn’t touch any of your family's other underlying privacy data. This kind of “one-time verification, globally usable” trust transfer is what can truly save common people time in running errands.
I heard that Abu Dhabi has already started deploying this sovereign-level network on a small scale.
But back to the market, as traders, we still need to raise a rigorous risk control alert. Recently, Sign's OBI incentives have indeed been very strong, with the total locked value (TVL) breaking through 10 million, which has maintained short-term liquidity well.
No matter how attractive the technical vision is, we must respect the real pressures of selling. In the face of this practical test, we should hold our bottom positions and use dollar-cost averaging to smooth out volatility. We will closely monitor its upcoming API call data in real governmental and business scenarios to see if this locked value floodgate can steadily catch the chips washing out next month.