Ushering into a New Era of Web3 Signing with EthSign Next

Built on Arweave, EthSign Next is our major pivot into the world outside EVM-compatible blockchains. Our new architecture allows not only users from different blockchain systems, but really anyone that possesses a cryptographic keypair to digitally sign, encrypt, and permanently store documents and independently verify their validity. The user interface has received another facelift and numerous quality of life features have been added based on feedback from EthSign 4. Now, Alice from Bitcoin can seamlessly sign documents with Bob from Ethereum, Caine from TON, and Sam from Solana.

Every time we build a new iteration of our product, we take our user feedback and mistakes from the previous version to heart. EthSign Next is the culmination of more than a year’s worth of lessons learned and brings about an overhaul of the entire tech stack. It is our fastest, furthest reaching, and most usable EthSign product yet — and we think you’re gonna love it.

Breaking the Chain Barrier

From its inception, one of the biggest problems facing the entire Web3 industry is the fragmentation and siloing of different blockchain systems. Even for veteran users, switching between blockchains is an annoying process, not to mention blockchains built on different virtual machines require different wallets to access. On top of that, universal data interoperability is nonexistent between blockchains.

Therefore, in order to break the chain barrier, we must end the reliance on smart contracts. This is not to say things are any less decentralized — as explained previously in EthSign Next: Visions of a Unified Web, we keep decentralization by flipping the data verification workflow and performing lazy verification. As a result of this paradigm shift, we now support multiple wallets from multiple blockchains interacting with each other on EthSign. Signing a cross-chain agreement between Bitcoin, EVM, TON, and Solana users is becoming a reality.

Convenience that Matters

EthSign Next comes with a host of convenience features designed to make user interaction more intuitive and effortless than ever before.

Push Notifications

If you are a signer of a contract and the uploader has provided EthSign Next with your email address or Telegram handle, real-time push notifications will be sent out through emails or Telegram messages.

Signature Styles and Contact Book

Create your own signature style in Settings to customize the visual style of your signature. You can type, draw, or upload an image, and quickly access it in the future.

It’s difficult to memorize everyone’s address, even your closest co-workers and friends. EthSign Next allows you to save the contact information of your collaborators so you can invite them by name to future contracts.

Contract Management

It gets increasingly impossible to manage all the documents and signatures when you start to have hundreds or thousands of them. EthSign Next allows you to create an organized folder structure for easy contract retrieval and signature management.

Security that Counts

We never store any user information or telemetry unless it is absolutely necessary for the application to function properly. Email addresses and Telegram handles, for example, do not persist server-side and are automatically discarded once the notifications are sent out. Your document and signing data never leave your browser unencrypted unless you explicitly consent to bypass our industry-standard AES-256-GCM and ECIES encryption.

We take privacy and data security extremely seriously — our business model does not and will never involve selling any raw or derived user data.

Blazing Fast, Zero Delays

One of the major complaints of EthSign 4 was the speed (or lack thereof) of the interactions and the fact that random errors caused by faulty RPCs would stop users from completing their task. This is not only frustrating for the users but for us as well, since these errors are caused by factors outside our control. By embracing the aforementioned verification model, we have moved away from smart contracts and replaced it with an open-source backend on AWS, resulting in the total elimination of any wallet errors and extra wait time. Taking complete technical ownership and control of the entire workflow also eliminates our inability to fix certain errors. Combined with front-end optimizations, CDNs, and edge servers, EthSign Next is our most performant product to date.

Decentralized and Trustless

Inarguably, two of the most important questions in the industry are “wen token” and “how centralized is this product”. With our previous talk regarding the use of AWS, it is only reasonable to raise some questions on our engineering practice in EthSign Next. Have we finally taken the red pill and gone down the rabbit hole of centralization since some think ordinary users don’t know any better or actually care?

For the longest time, we have struggled with striking the right balance between decentralization and usability. A product cannot be so decentralized that we become a hostage to the various tech stacks we utilize that are completely out of our control, but it also cannot be so centralized that if the platform unexpectedly terminates service, all historical user data is lost or obfuscated.

In EthSign Next, we decided to adopt the practice of decentralized settlement. Any documents still being signed are stored centrally to improve user experience while those that have completed the signing process (aka that have settled) are automatically submitted to Arweave at no cost to the user. Of course, regardless of the storage location, we fully respect and enforce the encryption rules set by the user. If the document is encrypted, nobody outside the intended group of recipients can decrypt the document, not even us.

We also took steps to make sure our users can still access their signed documents and cryptographic proof-of-consent even if we are gone. Once your documents have been permanently stored on Arweave, you no longer need us to access them and their respective metadata. You can easily index, decrypt, parse, and verify all your completed documents via an open-source tool that we will release later this year.

Don’t trust us — trust the code.

The Fight is Never Over

EthSign Next is now live. It is our biggest and most daring upgrade to our core product ever since our inception and represents an ongoing paradigm shift within our team. Over the next weeks and months, we are committed to bring more features and optimizations to EthSign Next that will cement its place as the leading Web3 chain-agnostic digital consent protocol. In addition, the enterprise-focused EthSign Pro is also in the works and to be announced in the near future.

We once again would like to show our appreciation for our investors and community for staying with us through thick and thin. Without your continued support, we wouldn’t have made it half as far. From the entire EthSign Team, thank you.