forbes.com
"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 having your data than Palantir." It is a contestable claim, and it skips past the case where the state is the threat.
So why hold a lira stablecoin instead of dollars? Yan does not pretend it earns you anything. A national stablecoin "is usually just a tokenized version of their own fiat," he said. "They would be the same." His pitch is control. A central bank "can directly do it by themselves," issue one national token, and grant itself easy on- and off-ramps, instead of licensing private issuers like the United States does. "They don't really need so many stablecoins. They will just do one." The bigger reason is geopolitical. "Digital sovereignty basically means every country controls their own digital infrastructure," he said. Right now, "the US and China build infrastructure for most countries. If there are two countries that don't like you, they can remove everything from you." The US can debank you; China can pull your payment app. Yan wants countries to own the off switch.
His longer bet gets stranger. "We're paving the way for a sovereign AI brain," he said. He expects an "AI PM" running the administrative machinery of the state. "Government is basically coordination, law enforcement. These are inhuman" jobs, he said, while "humans should be creative and doing their own thing." Today's digitization is the setup: "Without digitization, there's no way one day we can install the AI sovereign brain." He frames it as prediction, not product.
The case against is simple. Most central bank digital currency pilots have not scaled, Sign's client list is largely self-reported, and the jump from an airdrop tool to national money rails is huge. A government that owns the rails can also freeze them, which is the power Yan warns about when Washington or Beijing holds it.
Yan's own money is plain. "Mostly Bitcoin, and our own" token, he said, and he trades "less and less." His mother has done better: "My mom has a lot of doge. She's out-competed me for a long time." His advice to anyone chasing this is to get on a plane. "Travel enough and talk to enough people," he said. "There's a huge diversity out there." Some countries "have nothing, honestly. They just want a practical system that's cheap, fast and works. And they want to leapfrog."
His parting line argues against the very state power he sells. "Just trust blockchain more," he said. "AI is a super centralized technology." He sees it as a cycle, a "very Chinese metaphor" of yin and yang: "When there’s too centralized, the decentralized power will be stronger. And when the decentralized power is strong enough at the ceiling, central power rises," the way Bitcoin came out of 2008. If he is right, the map of who controls money moves away from two superpowers. If he is wrong, Sign hits the same wall as everyone else who promised a CBDC. The number to watch is the dollar's 89%.