EthSign

Enhancing EthSign with witnessed agreements

EthSign has successfully created a platform that makes access to legal contracts and agreement signing processes more user-friendly, while ensuring the same level of cryptographic security as your everyday onchain dapp. The contracts established via EthSign remain siloed, limited to the contexts and parties directly involved. This creates a missed opportunity for agreements made via EthSign contracts to be composable and reusable across various dapps and experiences.

Proof of Agreement

To address the lack of composability and extensibility of agreements made using EthSign, we will introduce Proof of Agreement.

Proof of Agreement is an attestation made using Sign Protocol that confirms the existence of an agreement between parties. This enables a third-party to verify the agreement's existence for business purposes, allowing EthSign and other third-parties to serve as witnesses that can attest to the signing of certain legal contracts.

Witnessed Agreements

Witnessed Agreements allow EthSign users to choose whether they want EthSign or a third-party entity to witness the signing of their agreements, resulting in an Attestation that serves as proof of agreement.

This proof of agreement will allow EthSign’s users to indicate their ongoing contractual arrangements with other parties onchain without revealing any sensitive details.

As part of this initial integration, EthSign will utilize Sign Protocol's expert tooling and support necessary for seamlessly integrating EthSign's contract signing platform with Sign Protocol. This will encompass (but not be limited to):

• API frameworks: The entire lexicon needed to establish connections and interact with Sign Protocol’s backends and infrastructure.

• A dedicated schema: A schema that has been purpose-built to facilitate the issuance of attestations for agreements made with EthSign’s contract signing platform

• Sign Protocol Toolstack and Infra: This will involve a suite of essential tools and libraries needed to make the operations and overall integration as seamless as possible. Some of these may include: Custom Indexers, Smart Contracts, and more.

Schemas

EthSign uses two schemas that cover the signing and completion of agreements:

[
  { "name": "chainType", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "signerAddress", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "cid", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "contractId", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "timestamp", "type": "string" }
]

[
  { "name": "contractId", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "cid", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "signersAddress", "type": "string[]" },
  { "name": "senderAddress", "type": "string" },
  { "name": "timestamp", "type": "string" }
]

Conclusion

EthSign presents a robust digital document signing application seamlessly integrated with any private key. With features like the Contract Template Library and Contract Verification, EthSign simplifies access to legal contracts while maintaining cryptographic security. However, the siloed nature of contracts limits their composability and reuse across different platforms. To address this challenge, we propose the Proof of Agreement concept, leveraging the Sign Protocol to attest to the existence of agreements.

By integrating Sign Protocol into EthSign through Witnessed Agreements, we anticipate enhanced composability, increased user sign-ups, and a network of attesters facilitating agreement signing sessions. This integration not only benefits EthSign users but also extends the reach of signed legal agreements into decentralized finance (DeFi) and beyond, fostering a more interconnected and efficient business landscape onchain.