Soulbound Tokens: Why you should start collecting them now and how to get it
At the beginning of 2022, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin posted a blog outlining his vision for Soulbound Tokens. A few months later, Vitalik Buterin and co-authors Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver published a paper to further concretize this vision. Since then, various application of Soulbound tokens has emerged.
In this article, we will take a deep dive into the different kinds of existing Soulbound tokens and where to get them.
Why do Soulbound tokens matter?
Soulbound Tokens (SBT) are non-transferable tokens that represent credentials, commitments, and affiliations and are linked to our “Souls.” To put it simply, SBTs are tokenized representations of all possible identity traits, including transient traits such as event participation, and aggregated traits such as academic standing, credits, personality, interest, and more. Tokenized identity traits make up a ‘Soul’ that belongs to the token owner. Each “Soul” in the network maintains a decentralized identity profile. And all “Souls” in a Network make up a decentralized community living on the blockchain.
Observing that blockchain technology has mainly focused on highly speculative financial applications of digital coins and assets, Vitalik Buterin believes that the application of SBTs will stray away from the industry from hyper-financialization and toward other digital assets that focus on building DeSoc.
SBT for KYC
The basis of a DeSoc is people. To represent that a wallet is backed by a real person instead of bots, Cryptocurrency exchange Binance and credential infrastructure Galxe have issued SBT to users who completed know-your-customer (KYC) requirements.
Individual applications
On-chain credentials are already being used by companies like 101 and RabbitHole. Web3 Q&A platform Curious.xyz will be using SBT to help users build on-chain reputations for answering questions.
Aggregated task platforms
If you are looking to collect more SBT, the aggregated Web3 SBT task platforms would be the place to go. On the Web3+ identity platform MetaMirror, SBT has been applied as a reward for Web3 campaigns. The platform currently has 38K users and one can find dozens of live campaigns every day from renowned Web3 projects, such as IoTeX, Findora, and BigTime GameFi. For each campaign on MetaMirror, a ‘badge’ in NFT/SBT standard is awarded to all the Campaign participants to symbolize their participation.
Beyond granting campaign-based SBT, MetaMirror is also looking to integrate the soulbound concept into its Web3+ DID product called MBuddy.
MBuddy Identity is a privacy-preserving DID build upon both Web2 and Web3 data. Inherently, the identity attributes are information tags bound to the ‘Soul’ of us. The emergence of SBT puts these identity tags into a protocoled standard that’s recognized and accepted by all applications in the network. This enhances the usability of DID products in the Web3 ecosystem.
— Ryan Y., COO and co-founder of MetaMirror
As the industry transitions from asset-based to people-based, we observe more and more Web3 communities are adopting SBT to increase their ability to deliver tailored services based on users‘ identities. Now is the time to collect SBT and start building your Web3 souls.
