Soulbound — A Vitalik Buterin Article Review and New Use Case

Vitalik Buterin is the 28 year old founder of Ethereum, as well as a prolific blogger. In a post from January 26, 2022, Vitalik outlined the concept of Soulbound items, their applications, and how they could impact society. In World of Warcraft Buterin writes, non-transferable, super powerful items acquired after completing particularly difficult quests come in the form of
soulbound items. These prizes are meant to keep the game “challenging and interesting, by making sure that to get the best items you have to actually go and do the hard thing.”

These items offer a similar status signaling mechanism as most NFTs. Soulbound items represent competency, effort, and skill, while a BoredApe immediately shows wealth and high status. Vitalik makes the point that since today’s NFTs are meant to be bought and sold in an open market, they are not built for permanent individual representation — but they can be.

We are seeing events offer tickets in NFT form, allowing people entry access and a post event “proof of attendance” — sort of like going to a festival and keeping the wristband on your arm for the weeks following. This is just one way non-transferable NFTs could replace the strictly
transferable way NFTs currently act in society. Vitalik puts it rather poetically saying, “making more items in the crypto space, ‘soulbound’ can be one path toward an alternative future, where NFTs can represent much more of who you are and not just what you can afford.”

I envision a world where individuals will complete skill challenges that prove a competency in a certain domain and be rewarded with a non-transferable NFT given out by the company, institution, or creator of the challenge. These will be a verifiable, credible form of proof that this person has certain skills or qualities. This could be used for students to bolster their credibility in the eyes of recruiters or for companies and institutions to incentivize specific skill learning by tying rewards to these earned tokens.

Congrats Vitalik on the merge! Keep leading incredible engineering feats and continue writing in a way that inspires the next generation of leaders.

Written by Max Potter