The Middle East conflict has revealed two extremely counterintuitive trends:

- Centralized facilities have become the primary targets in the conflict; once paralyzed, they will cause catastrophic consequences.

- The decentralization process in the Middle East and Central Asia is leading the world.

As evidence, on the 1st of this month, Iranian drones conducted targeted drone strikes on AWS data centers, severely impacting major financial institutions such as Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank.

Mobile banking in the Gulf region is expected to experience widespread outages, with financial activities in the region temporarily coming to a standstill, affecting a range far beyond the drone's coverage.

The fragility of centralized ledgers is undoubtedly revealed in war; clearly, local and neighboring governments have long considered this and are actively promoting data on-chain initiatives.

Taking Sign, which is familiar to those in the cryptocurrency circle, as an example, Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 / Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬 / UAE 🇦🇪 have all engaged in deep cooperation with it in the fields of civic identity or digital currency, generally categorized into two types:

- Human authentication: Putting the identities of citizens and visitors on-chain, which not only assists in management in turbulent areas but is also crucial to ensure that citizenship is not lost due to the destruction of physical records.

- Monetary authentication: Whether it is stablecoins, SWIFT, or CBDC, all are focusing on promoting the process of de-dollarization, allowing national financial sovereignty to be firmly in their own hands.

By using the Sign blockchain system to achieve true data decentralization, the security and stability are greatly enhanced, and at least the risk mentioned above, where a single point attack can paralyze the entire regional financial system, will be significantly reduced.

In summary, turning to another side of the flames of war, I see the world embracing blockchain at an unprecedented speed.