EthSign, a Singapore-based Web 3 application builder, announced Wednesday a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital India and Mirana Ventures (Venture Partner of BitDAO and Bybit), along with participation from Sequoia Capital and Sequoia Capital China.

EthSign is building end-user applications under a Web3 native philosophy. In Web3, user identity is represented by private keys, data is encrypted and stored in the decentralized network, and fund transfer is completed trustlessly via smart contracts. Decentralized architecture provides superior privacy with zero marginal cost. EthSign aims to leverage the newest blockchain techstack to build solutions for the most tangible issues.

“Cryptography, decentralization, openness EthSign is designed to empower 10,000,000 users and decentralized organizations” EthSign Project Lead Xin Yan said in a statement. In 2022, the team is set to prioritize product development and community growth.

Crypto assets allow people unparalleled freedom to form global connections and deploy capital across borders. Investments, grants, paying freelancers, and bounties are all examples of Web3 scenarios where individuals, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and even Web2 institutions can interact via the on-chain transfer of capital. Yet the standards by which these agreements are executed and enforced remains fragmented in Web3. Amidst the rapid expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem, proliferation of DAOs, and growing legal uncertainties within the cryptosphere, decentralized applications have been gaining momentum as a means to execute these tasks in a trustless manner. EthSign is building applications that bridge the crypto and traditional worlds, thereby initiating the mass adoption of Web3.

“Initially, we built EthSign as a decentralized Docusign for traditional and Web3 entities to conduct PDF agreements on the blockchain But, EthSign is set to catalyze the next era of agreement where the execution of terms can be trustless and automated. Instead of trusting the counter-parties and legal jurisdictions, we are creating code-based contracts on top of PDF contract terms, with the end-goal being completely self-executable agreements,” said Potter Li, Business Lead at EthSign.

To be noted, many of EthSign’s backers used EthSign Signature during the fundraising process. Other notable investors in the round include: Amber Group, Hack VC, Circle Ventures, NGC Ventures, Hashkey, Infinity Ventures Crypto (IVC), IOSG Ventures, Tess Ventures, Folius Ventures, Shima Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, Hash Global, KB Ventures, Mask Network, Matrixport, Synaps.io, AV Blockchain Fund, Goodwater Capital, Emoote, and Next Web Capital. Angel investors include Balaji Srinivasan, Tegan Kline(The Graph), Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon), Aniket & Ahmed (Biconomy), Liang Xinjun (Fosun International), Alex Shin (Hashed), Sid Powell (Maple.Finance), Li Ning, DiscusFish (Cobo), Thomas Vu (Riot Games), Tekin Salimi, MissBitcoin, Jaeson Ma (88 Rising) and many more.

“We have a series of exciting products in the pipeline, from next-gen EthSign to on-chain DAO and VC toolkits. More details will be available when they are ready but we cannot wait to put them in action and revolutionize the world of on-chain agreements and investments,” said Jack Xu, Technology Lead at EthSign.

EthSign Signatures, the team’s first product, is live on mainet and multiple EVM-compatible networks, amassing more than 10k users. EthSign Signature utilizes a Web3 tech stack to offer a fully-decentralized version of legally binding e-signature service. The team is developing a new version of EthSign Signatures, making bold attempts in terms of UX and functionality that will be launched in the second quarter of 2022.

EthSign Smart Agreements, a customizable escrow framework that enables the terms of electronic agreements to automatically execute based on predetermined, measurable on/off-chain trigger conditions, is slated to launch in the third quarter of 2022.

DAOs, unions, investment DAOs, and crypto projects around the world are collaborating at unprecedented rates. It is hard to onramp Web2 businesses to this decentralized governance model as it requires a whole suite of operating systems to manage structures, allocate work, and transfer funds. Based on the two core products, EthSign is growing by collaborating with these entities to provide use-case specific solutions like decentralized governance, decentralized bounty boards, payroll management, etc.

“Mirana Ventures is proud to back EthSign. As BitDAO’s venture partner, we are thrilled to see EthSign’s progress on building a series of dao tools that would facilitate the adoption of web 3, and we support EthSign’s roadmap to empower decentralized organizations and individuals,” said David Toh, Partner at Mirana Ventures.

Based on EthSign’s current technology, their newest product in development is EthSign Tokentable, a one-stop, on-chain investment tool for VCs, angels, and DAOs to automate the process of fundraising and vesting in Web 3. Major features include contract signing, fund transfer, cap-table management, token vesting, and more.

As EthSign’s user base and product lines grow, immense value can be extracted from smart contract data depicting business interactions. The team is poised to release documents on monitoring and verifying addresses/signatures in EthSign’s smart contract, and an open-sourced datavis dashboard and API to provide accessibility to the community. The team has plans to leverage their wealth of multidimensional on-chain data to map social networks and assign credit scores.

“EthSign is unlocking the full potential of smart contracts by making it easy for organizations and individuals to seamlessly adopt and incorporate them in their daily workflows and business scenarios. We believe it can become the de-facto platform for multiparty collaboration and consensus across both Web2.0 and Web3.0.” said Rohit Agarwal, Principal, Sequoia India.

Singapore FinTech firm Cake DeFi launches $100M venture capital arm