The $SIGN trump card and fatal flaws in the secret war of Middle Eastern settlements
Don't value $SIGN as if it were some kind of low-benefit sign-in protocol for the welfare crowd on Ethereum; the market's pricing of this thing is completely off. What Middle Eastern funds are desperately seeking is not the decentralized utopia of Web3 fundamentalism, but a backup settlement network that can instantaneously hard fork when faced with the big stick of sanctions from Europe and America.
Breaking it down, the dual-layer architecture of the Sign Protocol is actually extremely speculative. The underlying layer clings tightly to the control of consortium chains like Fabric Foundation, satisfying sovereign nations' obsession with absolute data privatization, while the top layer throws the state hash onto the public chain for global broadcasting. In contrast, the Midnight Network stubbornly adheres to a hardcore cryptographic path for data privacy protection, while Sign is purely the art of compromise. To put it bluntly, it walks the tightrope between sovereign black boxes and global consensus. After adjusting its underlying gateway, you'll despairingly discover that once geopolitical conflicts lead to localized physical disconnections, its heavily centralized RPC node-reliant hybrid storage mechanism will go blind in an instant, causing validation nodes to crash on a large scale.
Interestingly, the sovereign wealth funds in the UAE are not concerned about this fundamental infrastructure's vulnerability at all. They need TokenTable to directly take over the logic of releasing huge compliant assets, locking all human manipulation of multi-signature wallets into the hardcore code of smart contracts. But this precisely exposes an extremely cruel valuation flaw. If all Middle Eastern consortiums adopt privatized deployments to run the underlying validation business, the massive transaction frictions being absorbed by the payment mechanism within the intranet will completely negate the value of the $SIGN token in the secondary market. Unless these sovereign assets are forced to call upon the public validation network for clearing when circulating across trust domains in the future, the trust erosion in this part cannot translate into real consumption of the token. Otherwise, the so-called geopolitical infrastructure is nothing but a public relations bubble that can be easily burst.