Why You Should Use 'Sign Message' In Your Crypto Wallet

Identification is becoming more important in our daily lives. Not even passwords or PIN-codes are considered enough anymore. Fingerprints, FaceID, iris scanners… you can protect yourself in many ways. Also in the crypto world, where you do not normally have to reveal your identity, some sort of proof that you are the owner of your funds may be important.

Let’s say that you send coins to someone, and that person wants to verify that it is actually you who have sent the coins. That person will probably not approve you just showing them your public address that you sent the coins from. That is because a public address is available to everybody (hence the name public) and anybody can see the balance and transaction history of any public address and show it to anybody else. Therefore, it is not a reliable source to prove that someone is the owner of coins. It is only your private keys that are real proof that you own and control your funds.

Fill in your public address and create a custom message.

But is it really smart to show your private keys to someone? No, it really isn’t. Luckily, there is a function where you can have a custom signature that can verify your ownership but doesn’t reveal your private keys. Even more luckily, it happens to be a function that we now offer in the COINiD Wallet:

• Go to settings in your wallet. Choose ‘sign message’.
• Add the (public) address that you’d like to have signed. We support signing for both Bech32, SegWit and Legacy addresses.
• Create a custom message. Make sure that this is not a generic one; preferably you include both purpose and date of the signing.
• Click “sign message” and sign with COINiD Vault.

Just make sure that the information is right and the wallet will generate a signature for you.

• Now a signature will be generated and given to you (the signature starts on the second row under “Begin Signature” and stops before “End Signed Message”).
• Copy and save the signature to use in any future verifications.

Use your new signature to verify a message.

Now you can verify your signed message (this can also been done by a third party):

• Add your public address, custom message and signature in the assigned fields.
• Click “Verify message”.
• If the information is right, a screen will show a verification that you are, in fact, the owner of the coins.

An easy function to prove your ownership!

Signed message is a great way to prove that you own your private keys without revealing them to anybody. It is beneficial for everyone as a recipient can control that a transaction actually comes from the correct source, and it protects the sender’s private keys and can be used as proof for a transaction. No need for limitation based on doubt! Try it out in your COINiD Wallet to make and receive reliable transactions.