Introducing the Masa Whitepaper
Celebrating the 1-Year Anniversary of Soulbound Tokens
Happy one-year anniversary, Soulbound Tokens!
On May 11, 2022, Vitalik Buterin, Puja Ohlhaver and E. Glen Weyl first introduced the concept of a Soulbound Token (SBT) in the paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.
“Non-transferrable ‘soulbound’ tokens represent the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of ‘Souls’ can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem ‘Decentralized Society’.”
In the past year, Masa has built upon Vitalik’s original vision for SBT as an identity primitive for building a Decentralized Society. We believe that on-chain identity infrastructure is an essential building block to building a thriving web3 community. SBTs achieve this by establishing and maintaining digital identities, building engaged and authentic communities, and enabling rich, multi-dimensional data representation natively on-chain. This is the bridge to bring the next billion users to web3.
Masa was the first SBT-powered protocol to launch in August 2022. Nine months in, Masa has minted over 1.2M SBT on-chain identifiers for over 500K wallets across Ethereum, BNB, Polygon, Celo, and Base (testnet).
Today, we introduce the Masa Whitepaper, the first comprehensive technical draft of the Masa Protocol. In our whitepaper, we outline the architecture, design principles, and functionalities of the Masa Protocol, and discuss its implications for the future of digital identity in web3. Our aim is to demonstrate how the Masa Protocol can unlock new possibilities for decentralized applications, drive user adoption, and advance the vision of a truly Decentralized Society.
You can read the Masa Whitepaper HERE. Here are highlights you can’t miss from the Masa Whitepaper:
How do we define “on-chain identity”?
Identity is not only about Know Your Customer (KYC). Masa defines an individual’s identity as a range of credentials, behaviors, reputation, and affiliations on-chain Identity, is an individual’s sense of self defined by a set of physical, psychological, and interpersonal characteristics that is not wholly shared with any other person
Through a range of identity primitives that include SBTs and NFTs, Masa enables the representation of an individual’s complex and ever-changing set of identifiers, ranging from your domain names, to membership status, to contributions, to affiliations — all natively on-chain, accessible in-wallet. This holistic approach to digital identity empowers users to control their data and ensures continuity as identifiers evolve over time.
Why Soulbound Tokens (SBT) vs. Decentralized Identifiers (DID) & Verifiable Credentials (VC)?
As the world transitions from traditional web2 architectures to the decentralized web3 landscape, there is an increasing demand for scalable, interoperable, and standardized on-chain identity infrastructure.
Existing solutions, such as Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), have limitations in usability, interoperability, and programmable privacy, leading to a fragmented on-chain identity ecosystem.
Introducing the EIP-SBT
Masa has extended the ERC-721 standard to cater to the unique requirements of SBTs, providing a comprehensive interface for the development and implementation of SBTs. This new standard, EIP-SBT, aims to standardize the SBT concept across the Ethereum ecosystem, making it easier for developers to create and deploy SBTs for various applications.
The EIP-SBT standard provides basic functionality to mint, track and burn SBTs, resulting in a gas saving of 38% on the deployment and 3% on the minting over EIP-721.
In EIP-SBT, we outline three types of SBTs:
- Authority Soulbound Tokens, which gives authorized parties the exclusive right to mint tokens
- Self-Sovereign Soulbound Tokens, which allows end-users to mint new and verified tokens independently
- Zero-Knowledge Soulbound Tokens, which provides privacy-preserving and secure storage of private data on any EVM blockchain
What is the Masa Protocol?
Masa’s decentralized oracle network facilitates cross-chain identity data interoperability, private data management, governance, and account abstraction. Any builder can use Masa Protocol’s infrastructure tooling to deploy SBTs, request permission to read private data, as well as querying and replaying private data.
The Masa Protocol, utilizes a set of oracle nodes to govern decentralized identity data, drawing inspiration from Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network. To date, over 22,000 node operators have participated in Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Masa oracle node testnet — Phase 3 is due to commence in 2023.
The Future is Bright for SBTs
As web3 communities continue to evolve, the Masa Protocol is set to revolutionize identity infrastructure in web3. By delivering a robust, user-friendly, and privacy-centric infrastructure, the Masa Protocol cements its role as the leader in the identity infrastructure for user-oriented blockchains, web3 applications, and their communities.
How to Contribute
At Masa, we believe in the power of community-driven innovation and the importance of community feedback. We invite and encourage the community to help improve the Masa Protocol by submitting issues and comments in our GitHub repository here.
Read the Full Masa Whitepaper HERE
