Vitalik Buterin co-published a 37-page paper called the ‘Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul’, in which he predicts the future of Ethereum. Today we take a closer look at what is proposed in this paper.
According to Vitalik Buterin, the future of the Ethereum blockchain will revolve around soulbound tokens, also known as SBTs. Creating the merge of our society and code closer than ever before.
What is a Soulbound Token – SBT’s?
A Soulbound Token – SBT is a non-fungible token – NFT, that can not be transferred after it’s received. Meaning once you receive an SBT, you hold the SBT in a Soul wallet forever.
What will be the use case of Soulbound Token – SBT’s?
What exactly is the point of NFT’s that can never be transferred once they are received? Well, the paper suggests 3 different use-cases.
- Degrees: Universities could give degrees in the form of SBT’s to their graduates. Making those degrees copy resistible and forever connected to their students.
- Verified attendance: Companies that want to select new candidates based on conference attendance can filter through candidates with SBT’s. Making it impossible to fake attendance.
- Community building: A decentralized autonomous organization – DAO can build a community by airdropping SBT’s to attendees of certain conferences or programs.
- Medical records: Every test result and prior diagnosis could be dropped into your soul wallet and could be represented as SBTs.
What if you lose access to your Soul wallet?
Do you lose your degree, certificate or any other SBT if you lose access to your wallet? Well it isn’t that simple. The paper highlights the importance of a community wallet recovery.
Where the recovering of a Soul’s private keys would require a member from a majority of a random subset of the Soul’s communities to consent.
What about user privacy?
For those who ask themselves, are Soulbound Tokens – SBT’s going to require the user to fully doxx himself or do an in-real-life verification.
Well, we can say that an identity-based SBT could be a potential solution for a lot of verification problems. But on the other side we have to assume the willingness to identify, which will depend on who the authorities are that grant the specific SBT.
Could this be the future of web3 and the digitalization of the world? Or is this playing into the hands of authorities implementing more control?
