Safer Than Palantir': Sign Builds Stablecoins for Governments

"Government is actually the gatekeeper of the real world," Xin Yan said on the On The Margin podcast. "They gatekeep all the users, all the data, and all the assets." Yan is the co-founder and chief executive of Sign, and that line is the whole thesis of his company. Sign builds what he calls "sovereign digital infrastructure for countries." Two things, really: "digital money and digital ID for different governments."

The money piece splits in two. "Domestically people use CBDC, and overseas people use stablecoin." He did not start there. "I started my career as a crypto native person, like a crypto native geek," he said. "I joined crypto because of crypto mining. I was an engineer."

What changed his mind was watching good ideas go nowhere. "A lot of crypto great ideas didn't make it because of less integration to the real world," he said. "They fail to talk to the government." So he drew a conclusion: "We didn't work with the government enough."

About two years ago, he said, "we turned our crypto native business gradually into a B2G business." The market he is chasing barely exists. Total stablecoin supply has climbed above $320 billion, and the category is treated as crypto's clearest product-market fit. Almost all of it is priced in dollars. The dollar sits on one side of roughly 89% of global foreign-exchange trades, and non-dollar stablecoins are a sliver of supply.

Yan thinks the next wave gets issued by states, not by a private dollar token. Ask him which governments and the list runs long. He named the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan as active, with talks in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, plus Korea, Bhutan, Barbados, Dominica, and a contract he says Sign just signed in Sierra Leone. Those are his own descriptions of where the company works, and Sign has not published a verified counterparty for each one.

"The most important thing in this business is the trust between us and the government," he said. "We need to demonstrate we are a long-term player. We do everything by the rules." Part of the deal is keeping a country's servers at home. The data center "definitely needs to be within the border," he said, "to protect their data sovereignty."

And the work starts lower than people assume. "Government doesn't really have engineers," he said. The first job is digitization: "Without digitization, there's no data. We're using paper bills, and we need to right now use digital cash, and then we have the source of data."

How does a former crypto miner get a government to pick up the phone? Two endorsers, by his account. "Last year we found two backers. One is the government of the UAE, the second one is Binance," he said. Together "they opened directly B2G channels for us." He credits an earlier product, a token-distribution tool called TokenTable, with proving Sign could handle scale, claiming "more than 40% of market share" during the airdrop boom and "tens of millions" of users.

He also says the timing helped: "After Trump launched a coin, there's so many countries think about, should we give green light to crypto technology." Asked if his Binance contact was founder Changpeng Zhao directly, Yan said, "Sometimes, yes," describing Zhao as focused now on "crypto adoption at a country level" and advising presidents. Binance did not confirm that, and it is Yan's characterization.

The obvious worry about government digital money is surveillance, and Ivan Patriki pushed on it: a national ID could track citizens the way some fear in China. Yan is more scared of private companies. "How much data does Google have, how much data does Facebook have," he said. "They have less moral problems to monetize anything."

Cryptography handles the rest, in his telling. Zero-knowledge proofs let a system "verify things without having all the data," and most of what an ID needs already sits in a passport. Then the line he keeps coming back to: "If there's an entity going to have all the data, it will be much safer to have the government