Anybody can inscribe anything on a public blockchain, including something that says «made by Zoide». So the interesting question is not what a piece claims — it is what it can prove.
The badge means «signed», not «signed by us»
A sigma signature is a cryptographic signature on an inscription. The badge, and the sigma filter
in the market, mean exactly one thing: this piece carries a valid signature, whoever signed it.
There are three states, and a piece has one of them:
That is deliberately broad. A piece from another project, signed by that project, is legitimately signed — narrowing the badge to «signed by Zoide» would hide other people's genuine work behind a default filter, which is not the problem worth solving.
The problem worth solving: impersonation
What is not allowed is claiming to be us.
A piece that carries a valid signature from a signer we do not recognise and claims to be from Zoide — by naming Zoide as its app, or by pointing at one of our collections — does not appear on Zoide at all. Not in the market, not in a collection page, not in the showrooms. It is a rule of admission, not a filter you can switch off.
A piece that does not claim to be ours is admitted normally. It just does not get our name.
What the badge does not prove
An unsigned piece gets no badge and stays out of the sigma filter. That is all it means, and it is
worth being clear about what it does not mean: a missing badge is not evidence either way. Some
genuine material of ours has none — collections older than the signing protocol, and old covers of
collections that were later re-inscribed.
So the absence of a badge is never, on its own, a reason to trust a piece. Nor is somebody's explanation for why it is missing.
What you can check without any of this is the collection a piece claims to belong to, and its author, on Zoide itself — which is what its card names:
Signers change; history does not
The addresses Zoide recognises as its own signers are kept as a list, not a single key, and a retired signer stays on it.
That matters more than it looks: when a signing key is rotated, the old address is still the legitimate signer of everything minted before. With one key you would have to choose between disowning your own history and trusting a key you retired.
What this does not prove
- Not that a piece is valuable. Provenance is not price.
- Not that the art is original. That is a different question, and the answer to it is not cryptographic — see AI-generated items for the advisory check creators can run.
- Not that we verified the signature ourselves. The validity comes from the service that indexes the chain. What is ours is the decision of whose signature we trust.
Related
- What a piece page tells you
- Browsing, filtering and sorting — the sigma filter
- Glossary