Last year, I helped a friend deal with a cross-border contract dispute. He had agreed on a price with the other party in Tg, but later the other party said, "That's not what we meant at the time." The chat record screenshot showed that the other party claimed it was taken out of context. In the end, my friend took 60% of the money and couldn't recover the remaining 40%.
Later, I looked at the EthSign document for @SignOfficial and noticed a detail: after the contract is signed, a Proof of Agreement on-chain Attestation is generated, which any third party can directly verify the existence of this agreement without going through the EthSign platform and without authorization from both parties.
The content of the contract can be encrypted, but "the existence of this contract and the time point at which both parties signed it" is a matter that is publicly verifiable.
Looking at this from a Middle Eastern perspective makes the situation clearer. In cross-border trade in the Gulf countries, the core issue of contract disputes has never been "Is there a contract?" but rather "Can this contract be recognized by the other party's jurisdiction?" EthSign complies with the digital signature laws of mainstream countries, and the signature can be verified by anyone at zero cost.
It's not a perfect solution. Issues such as how to handle legal validity across jurisdictions and the conflict between Arweave's permanent storage and data protection laws are not directly addressed in the document.
However, in my friend's case, if a Proof of Agreement had been signed using EthSign at that time, the starting point of the dispute would have been different.
