How to think about the permanence of cryptographically signed messages?

Question

I'm making a couple of assumptions about signing messages from an ethereum wallet (Metamask), like the one in the screenshot:

• "By default" -- without extra work on the part of 1inch -- no record of my signing this message will appear on-chain
• If they wanted to or were forced to, 1inch could put this information on-chain: they could provably record the fact that the private key associated with my ethereum address signed this message

Please let me know if either assumption is wrong. Thanks!

(PS: to any US authorities reading this, I'm asking this question for journalistic purposes and will say so under oath 🙂)

Answer 1

Both of your assumptions are correct. Message signing happens off chain, and is in fact required in order to send a transaction on the chain (through signing a transaction).

To put a message on chain, you (or 1inch, ...) needs to actively send a transaction on chain including the signed message. A message signature is essentially just some binary data, so 1inch could put this on chain (together with the message hash) if they wanted to. Others would then be able to see who signed the message, by recovering the signer from the signature, and thus verify if your address signed the message.