A few months ago, in the white paper about decentralized society find that web3 solved Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s economic social technology. He tells the vision of a fully decentralized society or these core lenses and how we can make it a reality. In order to achieve this, we will need to create something called soulbound tokens(SBTs). But what it is, how do we use it and is it actually a good thing? To help us understand this in the web3 industry, Jiwa and Banner gave a talk about this.
Jiwa, co-founder of ntent.art
Dr.Banner, Managing Director of ntent.art
Full version: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1ZkKzbLwgDvKv?s=20
And here comes the recap:
Q1: What are soulbound tokens (SBTs) and the decentralized society (DeSoc), the details and mechanics behind these concepts?
Banner: Soulbound token is a concept that was outlined in the white paper by Vitalik Beuterin and has also been conceptually idealized by him or by other people and then just put onto the white paper by him. But his white paper was kind of the thing that respond to the whole discussion and soulbound token is a piece of data in the form of NFT that’s related to your actual person and that thing can represent many different things like a social security number or a college degree, or a position at a job, or the color of your hair your eyes or any number of different things that would associate to you and the main premise is that once you have one of these soulbound tokens, they stay in your wallet forever they’re non-transferable.
Jiwa: Soulbound token is just an NFT without a transfer function so you can send it to an address one time and it can never be transferred the way to that address and it’s bound to that address forever. And a decentralized society is basically a society that runs via various blockchains. There are many potential applications for soulbound tokens and I believe that we will see some applications be used that we haven’t really thought of yet and what’s kind of the most exciting about new technology coming out is what people think to do with it that no one else has done with it. But one of the more obvious use cases is that governmental use cases of issuing a security card or a birth certificate on the blockchain to a single address now that does cause a couple of concerns, what if that address is compromised? If someone gets hold of your private keys now someone has access to the soulbound tokens that could be a way to use that identify to impersonate that person. So there’s another contentious debate about whether they would be valuable or not or whether they would just kinda be used for these kinds of governmental reasons. But we can get into smooth that as we looking forward.
Q2: Does everybody want to disclose their identity on chain? And will that be a problem in the development of decentralized society?
Banner: This is very interesting and it’s more about data security. From a philosophical view, it doesn’t mean to have privacy if all of our data is protected. Do we need privacy? And what is the reason why we feel that we need privacy right now aside from being taken advantage of maliciously we through things like identity theft and scams, and things of this nature right and so? If in a decentralized future society, we have a strong correlation between the decrease in privacy and the increase in data security, there probably will be a very small percentage of people who feel they need to still hide, but the rest of society will kind of fall into this system where everything is public on the blockchain and everyone is protected via a very stringent data protection protocol and things like this. How far away from that are we who really knows? That could be a significant time for now before we ever see something like that become an effective part of society. But the idea would be if my data is protected then I don’t really need privacy. And then it becomes if you are hiding something you must be doing something wrong or trying to be deceptive or something to that nature and so, therefore, it would become something where privacy insinuates that you’re doing wrong because you have been protected. So I think that falls into a very deep philosophy around privacy and whether or not going to be a place where people would be safe enough to invest in that in the long term. I think the reality is eventually everyone’s information would just be public. But this is just my hypothesis.
Q3: What do you think in the future are we going to reach for a socialized real identity-based system？
jiwa: People need to be comfortable with being public because we have a history as people of wanting to keep things private. We are told to keep our government documents hidden, and make sure no one knows the security number cause that can get us in trouble. So I think there is a social and societal norm that we’re gonna have to overcome and of course, with that comes quite a deep effort of education to educate people in a way to make them more comfortable with these types of things. I do think that properly incentive people will make an effort to educate themselves and potentially change their minds if you tell someone that they can earn money or social credit by joining a certain network. Things do in a certain way tie your actual identity to your social identity and your blockchain presence and that’s incentives in the proper way. I think you will see people moving over because we are all looking for ways to support ourselves and our lives and way that provides more ease for us so I think with proper incentive position it could happen.
Q4: How does soulbound token be used and what are the SBT applications you’re looking for?
jiwa: The main use case of SBT is for governmental reasons like security numbers and birth certificates. I have also heard examples to just get away for governmental examples where it can be a signifier that you are at a certain place in a certain time, maybe like a holder perspective. Just use the Bored Ape as an obvious example, for instance, you held the Bored Ape token on August 22rd and they just wanted to give something to everyone in the community who helped their token at a certain time. Bored Ape could issue a soulbound token to all Bored Ape wallets at that time to basically take a snapshot of everyone who participate in the ecosystem at that time and then they can provide ongoing value to those addresses. So that’s just kind of one example outside of government where a community or an issue about soulbound could send hold another token and they provide utility based on that. So far we think that soulbound token still doesn’t have any intrinsic value because you can’t sell them and are not financially based like NFTs. So to imagine a scenario where soulbound tokens would have value I think essentially it’s when you can issue them to addresses and provide utility leading up to that event. So the value may not be associated exactly with the token itself but can be created in an environment around the soulbound tokens that make sense.
Another great use case of soulbound tokens within a specific jurisdiction in US or in China. Because Ethereum is a global blockchain in general can be a global mechanism. There is a whole world of possibilities around creating standards all countries and governments can’t get in line with. One example is medical records that people are very kind of shy about making public because people are embarrassed about certain things and don’t wanna be prejudiced. But it becomes big issues, for instance, you have a certain medical history that makes you sensitive and says you are traveling another country and you get injured that you’re conscious, that hospital in that country has no way of knowing your medical history so I think of like soulbound tokens can be really great use case of the kind of providing a central layer that all governments of countries around the world can respect the date. We can’t speak the same language in that way but my medical history has been provided to the soulbound token and the doctors can immediately work that of the blockchain. I think this use case pulls all countries of different parts of the world on the same page when it comes to certain important data. I think it’s another important use case of soulbound token.
Banner: From the government perspective, once the decision makers understand the power they were held by implementing blockchain technology, it’s an inevitable ability that there’s going to be a raise to the top. Globally speaking, for the international government to make moves and I think an easy example is the American internal revenue service which is the tax agency in the united states of America. This is an agency responsible for collecting taxes from American citizens. Now they’re relying on individuals to fill out the tax forms and they submit those tax forms for them and they’re relying on internal personal checks for these tax forms. This whole system is booky, clumsy, and inefficient. But if every transaction we made get stored on the blockchain verifiably and all of our income and paid checks and everything counts as income for us gets stored in soulbound tokens. So every time I get pay checked I get soulbound token that confirms I got that pay checked. All or less has to do is to implement a system basically reads every individual wallet’s soulbound income tokens. It’s verified basically asked the full amount of tax and there’s no giving in between the lines. So this is an interesting application that when governments figure out how they can essentially get the most amount of profit out of the people.
From a nongovernment’s perspective, that is quite scary. Because a lot of power is being put into the hands of the government that is a big control state and there without the right regulations and right people in charge of this, there can be a lot of downsides. An example of this is people have been talking about China’s social validation scores with a track of how valuable you are to society or something to that fact. This is kind of use case for the government doing something that does not really enhance the general happiness and well-being of civilized citizens, so there are arguments for the benefits and downsides of both of those. What we can do is have the ability to learn and understand from a deeper level what the implications are of allowing justice and the rightest personnel in our governments to make decisions that will negatively impact us. And so if we can effectively mobilize ourselves to put in the proper legal personnel to make sure that we’re all protected and that this technology is being used in its highest form for the good of everyone then I think we’ll see something good come from this.
Q5: How would you leverage the soulbound tokens in your own work in terms of managing a community or deploying the SBTs on chain?
Jiwa: I think one kind of use case is to give people who are early to your community kind of privilege poll forever. For instance, we have an art community and our collective is ntent.art and what we called ntent OGs, so they’re the first hundred people that joined our discord and we were super excited at that time when we just started that no one knows us, people, that have some faith and join us and join our conversation early with a big deal so we really like the idea these users to have the privilege in our eco-system. So I think that would be really cool use case that issues our ntent OGs of users of soulbound tokens something they’ll always have and you can prevent against getting them selling of profit or whatever.
The other use case is kind of the artistic conceptual art around soulbound tokens. I think soulbound tokens will also enter into a new world of conceptual art how can we were really truly related to the soul or how can we describe how soulbound tokens have nothing to do with the soul. One of the two in the art pieces is how can creating an NFT prove it to his wallet so to speak that he has one, sending a token marking Donald Trump to Trump’s wallet and he can never transfer the way and get out of his wallet. So there are many art statements that can be made with soulbound tokens we look forward to exploring that for sure.
Host: The nontransferable nature of the SBTs makes it obvious that we don’t know how to capture its value yet but it would be a very prosperous future if everyone adopts it and as we explore the possibilities of the soulbound tokens.
About BOOM Talks
BOOM Talks is a series of space events started by the official BOOM Twitter, focusing on industry trends and hot topics, regularly inviting celebrities, pioneers and KOL from crypto to share their views and opinions.
See More:
BOOM Talks 1 Recap: Is SocialFi Gonna be the Next Big Trend?
BOOM Talks 2 Recap: Survival in a Bear Market
BOOM Talks 3 Recap: If mining crisis comes, how do we survive？
BOOM Talks 4 Recap: Your Privacy and Security in Web3 Era
BOOM Talks 5 Recap: How Fed Rate Hikes Affect Crypto？
About BOOM
BOOM is a SocialFi platform connecting Web2.0 and Web3.0. Since it was launched in January, the early users have exceeded 100K and Boom has now become the most popular decentralized Crypto Lovers community in 2022.
Website | iOS APP | Android APP | Google Play APP | Twitter | Telegram | Medium
