SIGN’s 100M ‘Orange Basic Income’ pushes DeFi toward self-custody

$SIGN‘s 100 million “Orange Basic Income” locks rewards on-chain and pays higher yields to wallets that $SIGN in-house rather than on centralized exchanges.

$SIGN has unveiled its “Orange Basic Income” (OBI) initiative, a 100 million token incentive program designed to pay users for holding $SIGN in self-managed wallets rather than on centralized exchanges. The project describes OBI as a way to “reward real holders on-chain” and to “redefine value rewards for long-term holders” by linking payouts directly to wallet balances and how long tokens remain under self-management.

$SIGN is the native utility token of the Sign ecosystem, an omni-chain attestation and token distribution infrastructure originally incubated by the EthSign team. The protocol supports products like Sign Protocol, TokenTable, and SignPass, which handle on-chain identity, credential verification, airdrops, vesting, and unlocks over Ethereum and other major networks. $SIGN launched its token at the end of April 2025 with a total supply of 10 billion, after several rounds of funding backed by venture investors and a large allocation of airdrops by the community. The project is now in positioning $SIGN as a long-term governance and incentive tool for builders, institutions and the “Orange Dynasty” community, aligned with self-management and transparent distribution rails on the chain.

According to the launch materials, OBI Season 1 will distribute up to 25 million $SIGNwith 9 million tokens reserved purely for holding rewards. “To participate, users must… $SIGN in a self-custodial wallet,” an explainer states, adding that “tokens held on exchanges or locked on third-party platforms are not eligible.” The token itself is traded under the ticker $SIGNwith live prices and market data available on the dedicated page in the crypto.news market capitalization section.

OBI is explicitly described as a break from yield products that resemble traditional staking. Instead of promising a fixed return, $SIGN calculates rewards using a time-based formula that tracks on-chain balances over the course of a season, favoring wallets that commit to maintaining volatility while avoiding currency escrow. The team argues that this approach “leaves the traditional fixed staking model behind” in favor of a mechanism that more closely aligns incentives with decentralization and user control.

In the announcement thread on X, $SIGN called the program “Holder Supremacy” and urged users to “secure your eligibility by checking your $SIGN to a self-custodial wallet” before every snapshot. The launch comes as DeFi protocols from lending platforms to liquidity deployment services are in a race to differentiate themselves with more transparent reward structures, and reflects a broader industry trend of traders moving away from centralized platforms towards self-custodial and on-chain liquidity.

To support the plan, the foundation says all 100 million OBI tokens have been locked into a public custody address on-chain, with funds coming from a previous strategic buyback. This, $SIGN states that “each quarterly reward is fully collateralized and publicly transparent,” a structure aimed at institutional users and regulators wary of DeFi’s opaque token incentive programs and return promises.

Analysts are now looking at how OBI affects metrics such as token velocity, wallet numbers and their proportion $SIGN exchanges are held back because they will reveal whether self-custody incentives meaningfully change investor behavior. At the same time, the move comes amid increasing policy debates over hardware wallets, DeFi oversight and self-custody rules, underscoring how programs that displace assets from centralized platforms could become a focal point in the next phase of crypto regulation.

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