Mastering Crypto

The vast majority of the individuals who have to deal with digital systems do not pay much attention to what is going on between the time at which the item has been submitted and the time at which they are assured of the information. You press a button, and something will happen, that is it. However when that is performed in the form of a credential, a qualification, an identity check, an agreement, a government record then what actually occurs in the middle of the process greatly matters. Under @SignOfficial , a well-defined, formal process is in place which accepts an input and converts it into something that can be independently verified, without calling anyone, without the need to maintain a centralized database, and without the verification going out of date as soon as it becomes inconvenient.
It begins when no data is even provided. The definition of a schema has to be established first before any attestations can be made, essentially the blueprint of how the information will be structured, what type and in what form it will be. Treat a schema as going ahead to define what a credential is expected to look like prior to any signature of the same. A KYC check, a university degree, a compliance certificate - each of them is in a different shape, needs different fields, has different relations between the data points. Schema Registry is a publicly stored repository of these templates by $SIGN , thereby providing an attester operating with a particular schema with an agreed standard to work with. This is what that common ground renders readable and writable by any third party downstream the resultant attestation.
When there is a schema, an attester, or a person, an institution, a smart contract, can produce an attestation. The validity of a claim is affirmed and attested. SIGN does this using digitally signed structured data meeting a registered schema, and secured on-chain or off-chain. The attester completes the necessary fields, signs the information with his/her own key with the help of the digital signature, and sends it. That is what distinguishes between an attestation and a bare record. It does not only demonstrate the existence of the data, but that a particular and identifiable party vouched it at a certain time.
Once the attestation has been signed the protocol makes decisions on the location to store it depending on the size and usage. Smaller attestations can be stored in full on-chain to be as secure as possible, whereas larger ones store the primary data off-chain - on Arweave or IPFS - and have a cryptographic connection with the blockchain. This is a significant design decision. It is costly and unworkable to store all on-chain and credential-scale systems used by governments. SIGN will be able to operate on millions of credentials by isolating the proof anchor and data body to avoid committing all bytes to a cryptographic registry. The chain contains the most important item the verification fingerprint. The remainder is stored in non-volatile prudent storage.
The validation occurs when attestation is created and not afterwards. Schema hooks known as ISPHooks are invoked after each attestation function and it enables other checks and logic to be invoked at the creation point. A hook rollback will bring it down to a rollback of the complete transaction and hence bad data will never be captured. This is a simpler model than the system most of them employ. Instead of taking it and marking it in the future, SIGN refutes invalid attestations when they are made. A whitelist check, a fee check, a format check, each of this occurs prior to any action committed. When an attestation gets on-chain it has already been checked.
Attestations can be indexed and their locations can be searched using SignScan which is the indexing and explorer layer of SIGN. Sign Protocol provides an indexing service to find and access schema and attestation information in the shortest possible time, through REST and GraphQL interfaces and directly with the NPM SDK. A verifier is another smart contract, a government portal, a third-party application can retrieve any attestation by its ID, verify its signature, verify the schema, verify the timestamp, and verify it is not revoked. This will be without having to touch on the original issuer. The trust is done by the infrastructure.
It is something more enduring than a document and more truthful than a database record that this flow creates. It is a chain of custody process, input, schema validation, cryptographic signature, storage and finally retrieval where each process can be traced and none of it requires a person living up to it afterward. The $SIGN token is circulated throughout this whole system, where transaction fees are processed, governance is powered and network incentives are provided to get the network running.
It is the actual design of end-to-end verification, which is designed correctly. Not a PDF. Not a screenshot. Not a call to a helpdesk. A digitally-verified, schema-constrained, cryptographically anchored data that establishes itself, at any moment in time, to any party which requires examination.
#SignDigitalSovereignInfra

There are about 17 million JavaScript programmers throughout the globe. That figure has been mentioned so frequently it has almost become background noise but it can have some real impact when one considers what it implies to a new technology that is struggling to find its footing. Any platform that can actually get close to such developers and use the patterns they already know, the mental models they have already developed, begins with an immense structural advantage. The question on blockchain has never ceased to exist whether blockchain can bridge that gap. The majority of networks are yet to be closed.
The average developer experience of a developer transitioning to Web3 is being introduced to Solidity or Rust, learning how blockchain state functionality, adjusting to toolchains that do not even look like what they were used to, and being okay with the fact that most of the abstraction layers they are used to are not present here. To many developers, such an expense is prohibitive. It may be interesting technology. The use case may be convincing. However, once the learning curve is high, people have something else to construct. Talent does not travel into hard-to-work situations but rather into shippable situations.
The programmers at @MidnightNetwork have created their own programming language named Compact, and the main concept of the language is as follows: developers do not need to leave the knowledge base to create privacy-protective smart contracts. Compact is written in a JavaScript-like syntax and familiar programming patterns, allowing the intellectual burden of transitioning to the ecosystem of a blockchain to Compact to be much smaller than what most blockchains require. You're not starting from zero. You are elongating out of some place you have been.
This is not merely a factor of convenience. With a familiar language developers may work on the problem being solved, as opposed to the tool being solved with. It is then that, interesting applications get built. The learning curve of entirely new paradigm does not only reduce the speed of the developers but also weeds out most of the developers who could have created something useful had the threshold been lower. Compact is an intentional effort to retain that kind of population to the room.
The question is what Compact is really up to underneath that makes this more than a developer experience story. The language is designed to reduce to the ZK circuit layer of Midnight, and this implies that the developer can write surface level code and have the network work out the zero-knowledge proof generation behind the scenes. The privacy is not something to add later the infrastructure does the work of creating it as a byproduct of writing in Compact. The combination of that, which is the syntax that is already familiar and a cryptographic infrastructure that is in place and is taken as an abstraction is precisely the sort of abstraction that is likely to open new classes of builders.
The token of $NIGHT , the Midnight, drives the network that these developers are constructing. The easier it is to construct a network on, the more valuable becomes the ecosystem around NIGHT. The connection between the accessibility of the developers and the long-term sustainability of any blockchain network is direct. Midnight appears to realize that well enough.
The programmers who will ultimately make privacy-first applications will reach mainstream users are not necessarily all cryptographers. The vast majority of them are currently working in JavaScript, creating applications that have no relationship to blockchain, unaware that there exists a network that was created with them in mind partially. The first point that Compact is Midnight makes to that audience is that, it is evidence that you do not need to decide between using the same tools that you are familiar with, or using a technology that will protect users in reality. That would be an argument that gets lodged, and who comes to construct the next generation of the internet would be different.
$NIGHT #night

It is a question best pondered upon: when you store information about a person, what are you storing? The majority of digital systems constructed nowadays revolve around data: names, dates, records of transaction, identification number. Data alone do not inform you on the truthfulness of something. It records what one wrote down. That is a minor, yet non-negligible distinction and one that @SignOfficial has made its whole infrastructure on.
The internet has never been a bad data storage medium. What it has never been especially good at is certifying it. An image of a diploma, a picture of a transaction, a government-issued document uploaded to a form - they are files. They are manipulable, replicable or even counterfeit using tools that any person can locate on the internet. The level of checking that you know this is real and is a certified source has never been taken seriously. It is typically a phone call, some third party service, or the hope that a database somewhere has not been manipulated. None of them can be trusted at scale.
This is the gap that $SIGN is endeavoring to bridge. Instead of creating a new system to store data, SIGN is constructing infrastructure to store evidence. In particular, it is an omni-chain attestation layer - a protocol that enables any individual, organization or government to issue verifiable records of any statement, cryptographically signed by them, on multiple blockchains at once. An attestation is not a document that it happened. It is a signed and structured document that could be verified freely by any person, any time without the necessity to refer to the initial issuer.
The difference is more than it would appear. Consider what occurs when a government is interested in making payments related to welfare, or when a company requires assurance that a contractor has cleared a background check, or when a university is interested in issuing a diploma that can be accepted in another country. In both scenarios, the problem behind is not storing the information but ensuring that that information can be checked by the parties who was not involved with the creation of the information previously. The Sign Protocol provided by $SIGN deals with this by binding attestations to digitally signed schema, cryptographic proofs, and digital signatures. A verifier verifying an attestation does not need to call anybody. They check the chain.
The truly interesting fact about the architecture is that it does not push everything into the blockchain. Sign Protocol also features on-chain and off-chain storage, in which durable off-chain storage is done with Arweave but the verification layer remains on-chain. This is practically important since a full on-chain storage is both costly and sluggish in the case of big credential systems. Separating data whereabouts and proof whereabouts lets SIGN scale to the government scale without making a verifiability and cost-efficiency compromise. The evidence is ever available. The information is kept in the reasonable place.
This separation also addresses a privacy issue which most credential systems silently neglect. In the case that all of your personal information resides on a publicly accessible blockchain, privacy and transparency are mutually exclusive. SIGN solves this by zero-knowledge proof support, that is, the holder of a credential can prove that something is true (I am over 18, I passed this compliance check, I have this qualification) but without showing the underlying data that demonstrates it. The proof exists. The data stays private. That is a radically different model to the majority of the digital identity work being done today.
All this is executed by the $SIGN token - this is how the network executes attestation transactions, this is how governance decisions are executed, and this is how the participants in the ecosystem are rewarded to participate in its infrastructure. It's not decorative. The more SIGN spreads out to additional chains, additional uses, additional government implementations, the more it acts as a connective tissue of the economic layer underlying it all.
The direction that SIGN is assuming is towards something that is, technically, not an easy task to accomplish: a world where credentials are served with the proof attached, where you do not need to trust someone to make a claim before it is proved, but where cryptography does. This infrastructure is already being implemented by governments in the UAE, Thailand and Sierra Leone. This year Kyrgyzstan became a signatory of CBDC infrastructure. These are not evidence of concept they are some of the first signs that the data warehouse transition is already in progress, and the plumbing to realize it is being installed as we speak.
#SignDigitalSovereignInfra