Despite the ongoing regulatory crackdown on the crypto industry and the collapse of some of its poster children, the underlying decentralized technology continues to drive internet incumbents into the web3 space.

Telegram and Line, two of the world's most popular messengers, have hundreds of millions of users every month. Both are recently integrating crypto features. The feature being introduced to both these apps is e-signing, which is powered by a startup called EthSign.

With backing from all three divisions of Sequoia - Sequoia Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Capital China (now called HongShan), Singapore-based EthSign aims to be the web3 equivalent of DocuSign with the promise of an added layer of transparency and trustworthiness. Its job then is to convince the masses that signing contracts on the blockchain is superior to the traditional method.

"For one, it is much easier to authenticate the identity of each signing party and see a history of their interaction with the signed document," said EthSign's co-founder and CEO Xin Yan, who previously worked at the strategic investment arm of the centralized exchange Huobi.

This would result in the loss of records about all users' signatures should a classical e-signature service provider go out of business; not so with distributed ledger technology, Yan said to TechCrunch. And once it's signed, it's immutable, a function that is one of the most promising features of blockchain.

EthSign is deployed on the respective blockchain network that runs on Telegram and Line, TON and Finschia. Once the users connect their crypto wallets to the messengers, they can start signing documents through EthSign the way they'd interface with DocuSign.

EthSign is now live as a mini app on Telegram; it will even alert the users of a list of documents which are pending for signing and, once a contract opens up, the user will be nudged to connect their crypto wallet and scroll to the bottom to sign and, at that moment, EthSign will ask them to access the user wallet addresses in order to have their tamper-proof blockchain signatures. (Check a demo of the feature below.

2/ Want to see how to sign contracts directly in Telegram?

Here's a quick demo of how EthSignBot works. pic.twitter.com/S7lo3PXMft

EthSign is one of the many web3 projects that are building on TON, Telegram's blockchain partner that is helping the messenger work toward its vision to become a WeChat-like super app.

Already live on Line as a web app, EthSign has signed a memorandum of understanding with Finschia for further integration in the coming months.

The concept of immutable signatures on messaging apps isn't new. Back in 2018, a mini app called "Little Protocol" launched on the Chinese messaging giant WeChat. With this feature, users can bind themselves to an agreement with their WeChat IDs with the content of the document recorded on Ethereum. Overnight, this feature attracted over 100,000 visits. In less than 48 hours, however, WeChat took down the app.

To date, EthSign has been hooked up to some 250,000 unique wallet addresses. It still is free to use and aims to become an attestation service platform in the near future and charge for all forms of attestation, verification and other user activities, rather than following the traditional SaaS model that monetizes itself through subscription fees.

"To attest information on-chain is to bring trust to the on-chain world, where the most promising use case is vampire attack," Yan explained, referring to a web3 phenomenon in which users are lured into a forked version of an established crypto project that offers enhanced incentives.