What are Soulbound tokens? Why am I thrilled about them?
Web3 at its current pace has already become web5 or web69, and every couple of weeks you hear about something new happening. I fell in love with blockchain technology when I was 17. I read the bitcoin paper for the first time 6 years ago. The financial application of the bitcoin chain was pretty evident to me then but what was not evident to my 17yo brain was the use of decentralization to other factors of life. I was very happy with my Facebook account and qwerty keypad messaging at that point. And now after 6 years of reading about bitcoin, soulbound and resume’s as NFT has got me curious again. I know there is a lot of debate on DIDs, VCs, vs SBTs. I love them all because they bring a change in our lives which was not talked about earlier and can make a huge impact. So now that we have set up our story let’s understand what are SBTs?
SBTs! Tokens bound to your soul (but are they really?)
What are the things that are bound to our souls theoretically? Our respct, characteristics, job profiles, education, criminal record, etc. Soul bound for me means anything that cannot be taken away from you once you have achieved that. It can be both good and bad in the practical world. In the real world, we have a soul (debatable but let that be), in the digital world, our souls are our digital profiles across different social media platforms. My soul is on Behance, Github, Twitter, Instagram to some extent, steam profile, LinkedIn and I ran a blog post like 7 years ago and whatnot. This is because these profiles have my reputation, my educational background, my characteristics, and my gaming profile. In web3 all of these will be linked to your wallet addresses. Because that's what we are talking about right? Your wallet has all your transaction data, if you are using lens protocol for social media all of your social media data is linked to the connected wallet if you play any game on web3 your assets & score are connected to your wallet. So that means your data is your reputation in the digital world. SBTs give you proof of these data points and metrics and achievements as tokens which cannot be transferred and are bound to your soul/wallet. You can use these SBTs to get better interest rates from lending protocols (acts as a Sybil score) and prove DAOs & Communities of your ethics & contributions (acts as your resume) there are a lot more use cases as discussed by Vitalik & other authors in their recent paper. You can also check out a very insightful summary created by Respct Team on this document.
These discussions on SBTs are very young. In the blockchain, there come many technologies and concepts which take a really long leap of hype and then are not found in conversations. I don't want this topic to die in the intellectual mind actually, because these SBTs might just look like another non-transferable token (will talk about technical details of SBT later) but these are worth it. These create your on-chain reputation which you can use to get access to different parts of web3. I am thrilled about these tokens because they make actual sense just like the bitcoin paper did to me in 2016.
A very simple example, how do you prove to someone who wrote on LinkedIn that they are working at XYZ company? You talk to their HRs, find out their employment records, and I don't know what not. Just mint them an SBT which holds the information that this person is SDE-1 today at this XYZ company. Whenever they become SDE-2 just mint them another SBT. There is a billion-dollar industry to do that background check and resume verification. You can simply bring that time down to 1 second for any employer in the world and remove all this hassle (let's not go to the bad history of someone which can be made possible too). I am someone who believes in the present-day problems and wants to solve them. And you know what, we are solving these issues at Respct. We are working on gamer profiles on web3, which can help fetch them game assets at cheaper interest rates, access to better teams, early access to new Web3 Games, access to airdrops and whatnot. We are already a small community of 1000 players and almost 11 partnerships in the domain. If you are interested in what we are doing just hit me up at @utsavsingla on Twitter and Telegram. My DMs are open to all sorts of conversations.
