Last week I noticed something odd while looking at how Sign credentials move between apps.
Most verification systems store identity inside the platform that checks it. The moment you leave, the proof stays behind.
Sign flips that relationship.
The credential itself becomes the portable object, not the platform that issued it. Applications don’t need to know you they only need to trust the issuer that signed the credential.
In practice, that means identity stops being locked inside individual services and starts behaving more like shared infrastructure.
What makes this interesting isn’t convenience.
It’s that once trust becomes portable, the network that reads those credentials quietly becomes the real system being built. Not the apps. Not the tokens. The layer no one thinks about until it’s already everywhere.