SuperEx Educational Series: Digital Signatures — The Trust Seal of the Crypto World
When it comes to signatures, everyone should be familiar with them. In the real world, we have long been used to the act of signing: contracts need signatures, checks need signatures, documents need signatures. The meaning of a signature is only one thing: to prove that “this is something you personally approve of and take responsibility for.”
But here comes the question: when all actions take place in the digital world — when there is no paper, no pen, no “name written by your own hand” — what does trust rely on to be established? There is only one answer: Digital Signature.
If you are using online banking, electronic contracts, blockchain wallets, crypto exchanges, NFTs, or DeFi, then you are almost certainly “using digital signatures” every day — you may simply not realize it. In today’s article, we will systematically, thoroughly, and in plain language explain:
what a digital signature actually is
what problems it solves
whether it is the same thing as an “electronic signature”
what role it plays in blockchain and the crypto world
why we say: without digital signatures, there is no Web3
Why Must the Digital World Have “Signatures”?
First, think about the most basic question: on the internet, how does a system confirm that “this operation was truly initiated by you”? You might think of a username plus a password, but is that enough?
Of course, the early internet answer was: username + password. But this solution has three fatal problems:
passwords can be stolen
servers must store passwords (or hashes)
once the database is leaked, the consequences are extremely severe
More importantly: a password can only prove that “you logged in,” but it cannot prove that “a specific instruction was authorized by you personally.”
What happens if there is no signature? Suppose there are no digital signatures:
hackers can forge transfer instructions
platforms can deny user operations
users can also deny their own operations in return
the entire system falls into one sentence: “who did it?”
In finance, trading, assets, and legal contexts, this is completely unacceptable.
One Sentence to Explain What a Digital Signature Is
A digital signature is a technology that uses mathematical methods to prove that a message was indeed sent by the holder of a certain private key, and that it was not tampered with during transmission.
If we break it down into three points, then a digital signature simultaneously solves three things:
identity confirmation: confirming “is it you?”
data integrity: confirming “was the content changed?”
non-repudiation: you cannot deny afterward, “I didn’t do it.”
These three points are the foundation of every digital trust system.
But one point must be emphasized: a digital signature is not as simple as “turning your name into an electronic version.”
Many people, when they first hear “digital signature,” picture something like writing a name on a PDF with a mouse, or pasting in a photo of a handwritten signature. These behaviors may be recognized as “electronic signatures” in legal contexts, but at the technical level, they do not automatically possess the security properties of digital signatures.
A true digital signature is not about what it “looks like,” but about whether any third party can independently verify its authenticity. This is the most crucial — and also the most easily overlooked — value of digital signatures.
Let’s use a more intuitive angle. In the real world, your handwritten signature is useful because most people cannot imitate your handwriting, so the legal system recognizes it as uniquely tied to you. When disputes arise, authenticity can be judged through examination.
But in the digital world, those same foundations must be rebuilt through technology. So what digital signatures do, in essence, is this:
using mathematical laws to replace “handwriting features”
using algorithmic verification to replace “manual appraisal”
using the irreversibility of cryptography to replace “trusting a third party”
As long as the signature passes verification, the system does not need to “trust you as a person.” It only needs to trust one sentence: “only the holder of the corresponding private key could have generated this signature.”
This is also why digital signatures are naturally suitable for the internet and blockchain environments, because in the network world:
nodes do not know each other
there is no unified central referee
information is constantly copied and forwarded
If there were no mechanism that could still achieve identity confirmation and responsibility binding in a zero-trust environment, then any complex digital collaboration system would collapse immediately.
And digital signatures are precisely the smallest and most critical technical unit for solving this problem. From this perspective, you will realize: digital signatures are not an “add-on” feature of blockchains, but a prerequisite that no decentralized system can avoid. Whether it is transfers, authorizations, voting, smart contract calls, DAO decisions, or on-chain identity authentication, behind all of them there is only one action: signing a piece of information in a way that cannot be forged and cannot be denied.
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Only after you understand this point do you truly understand why we say: digital signatures are the foundation of the entire digital trust system, not some minor feature.
The Technical Core of Digital Signatures: Asymmetric Cryptography
To understand digital signatures, you cannot avoid one keyword: asymmetric cryptography.
- What Are a Public Key and a Private Key?
Every user generates a pair of keys. The private key is known only to you, while the public key can be made public to anyone. Their relationship is:
use the private key to sign
use the public key to verify
- An Extremely Important Fact
From the public key, it is impossible to derive the private key. This is the foundation of digital signature security. Mathematically, this relationship is usually based on:
large integer factorization
the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECC)
Under current computing power, brute-force cracking is practically equivalent to impossible.
A Concrete Process: How Digital Signing Works
Simulated scenario: you want to initiate a transfer and you need to perform a digital signature.
Step 1: Generate the transaction information
For example: recipient address + amount + timestamp + other parameters. This is plain-text data.
Step 2: Hash the information
The system first performs a hash operation on the transaction data to produce a fixed-length value. No matter how long the original text is, the output length is fixed. Change even one character, and the result becomes completely different. The function of this step is: ensuring data integrity.
Step 3: Use the private key to sign the hash value
Note: the private key does not sign the “transaction content” directly. It signs the hashed result. After this step, what is generated is: the digital signature itself.
Step 4: Broadcast the data + the signature
What you send outward includes: the original transaction data + the digital signature. Any recipient can verify whether the signature is valid using your public key.
Step 5: The verification stage — how do others confirm “it was really you”?
The verification process is equally important. The recipient receives the transaction data, performs the same hash on the data, and uses your public key to verify the signature. If verification succeeds, then three things are simultaneously true:
the signer holds the corresponding private key
the data has not been tampered with
the operation is non-repudiable
The entire process requires no third party.
Why Do We Say: Blockchain = A Collection of Digital Signatures?
When many people first encounter blockchain, they are overwhelmed by terms like:
decentralization
consensus mechanisms
immutability
But if you break blockchain down to its lowest level, you will find: a blockchain is essentially a historical record strung together by digital signatures.
- Every transaction must have a digital signature
On a blockchain:
there is no account + password
there is no manual review
there is no customer service confirmation
The only credential that allows you to do anything is: your digital signature on the transaction.
- What happens to a transaction without a signature?
The conclusion is simple: it is directly rejected by the entire network. Nodes do not care who you are; they only care about one sentence: “is the signature correct?”
A Common Misunderstanding: A Wallet Is Not a “Coin Storage Tool,” but a “Signing Device”
This is a common misunderstanding among new users: what does a wallet actually store?
A critically important fact is this: a wallet does not “store coins.” The only thing a wallet truly stores is: the private key. And the asset balance you see comes from the blockchain’s state record of your public-key address.
Likewise, the most core function of a wallet is not transferring, and not viewing balances, but: securely completing digital signatures locally.
This is also why: once the private key is leaked, the assets are guaranteed to be lost, because the seed phrase is simply another representation of the private key.
The Role of Digital Signatures in Crypto Exchanges
At SuperEx, digital signatures are an essential part of the underlying security architecture:
user asset aggregation
hot and cold wallet transfers
multi-signature risk controls
withdrawal authorization
Especially in advanced security schemes such as multi-signature and MPC (multi-party computation), digital signatures are an irreplaceable foundational module.
Note: Multi-Signature — When “One Person Signing” Is Not Secure Enough
In some high-value scenarios:
project treasuries
institutional funds
DAO asset management
the risk of a single private key is too high. This is where multi-signature is used. Its working principle is very simple: a transaction requires M signatures out of N private keys to take effect. This greatly reduces:
single-point mistakes
internal misconduct
private key leakage risks
Final Words: Why Must You Understand Digital Signatures?
You may not write cryptographic code yourself, but you must understand the logic of digital signatures, because:
it determines whether you truly own your assets
it determines whether you possess a digital identity
it determines whether you can take responsibility for yourself in Web3
in the Web2 world, platforms take responsibility for you
in the Web3 world, you are responsible for your own signatures
