“In a world where his observation seems more prescient than ever, learning how to program futures that encode sociality — rather than writing over trust — seems a required course for human life on this planet to persist.” — Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver and Vitalik Buterin
The concept of Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) was forwarded by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in May 2022 alongside economist and social technologist Glen Weyl and lawyer Puja Ohlhaver. The three co-authored a white paper titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” for their proposed Web3 project, which revolved around creating SBTs, or digital identity tokens. These tokens will ideally represent a person or entity’s traits, achievements, features and other relevant personal data.
This data may include work history, credit scores, education, medical information and history, professional certifications and the like — all encoded on a blockchain. SBTs stem from the 2004 game World of Warcraft’s concept of “soulbound,” which refers to a property that prevents items from being traded or transferred. The SBTs will technically be nontransferrable nonfungible tokens, essentially operating like a person’s or entity’s “soul” in the context of Web3. The authors outlined the foundation of “DeSoc,” a fully decentralized society governed by users, with SBTs functioning as credentials that people can utilize to carry out daily activities.
The idea of SBTs being requisite in an imaginary DeSoc was naturally met with a lot of skepticism in the cryptocurrency community — but also a lot of enthusiasm. The concept was naturally very divisive.
Some cryptocurrency community members argued that SBTs were a positive, potentially efficient way for people to streamline and verify one’s information. Yet others opined that SBTs were similar in concept to China’s authoritarian social credit system. The authors themselves acknowledged both the good and bad sides of SBTs in their white paper. They went as far as titling a subsection “Souls can go to Heaven…or Hell” to illustrate that while the technology’s potential was truly transformative, it also had the potential to be destructive.
SBTs, in theory, could be used for good, such as compensating in-group dynamics or achieving cooperation despite differences. However, the co-authors illustrated that they could also be used for malicious purposes, such as automating the redlining of certain social groups based on their data and targeting them for cyber or physical attacks. Crypto Twitter was abuzz after the white paper’s release, and Weyl reportedly disclosed that SBTs were slated to be available for “early uses” by the end of 2022. Binance took up SBT development and made good on Weyl’s timeline, launching its own SBT, Binance Account Bound, on Sept. 8.
Masa Finance launched its mainnet on Ethereum on Jan. 17, becoming the first protocol to plant Buterin’s proverbial “Soulbound” utility seeds on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform aims to empower users to mint SBTs on the protocol, including “.soul” domain NFTs, Masa Soulbound Identity SBTs and Web3 credit reports. Other potential implementations include Know Your Customer verification, proof of participation and more.
However, aside from these early implementations, there has been no news yet on SBT development insofar as Buterin, Weyl and Ohlhaver’s DeSoc are concerned. In an interview, Weyl also mentioned that SBT efforts might be pushed well into 2024.
