Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) Should Be Signed Claims | Kate Sills

Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin argue that we should create non-transferable, initially public, “soulbound” tokens to represent commitments, credentials, and affiliations. This is a bad idea. Instead, we should make off-chain statements digitally signed with Ethereum private keys.

Average reading time: 20 minutes. A big thank you to Rick Dudley, Matthew Di Ferrante, and Kaliya Young for reviewing drafts of this post. All errors remain my own. Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) A recent paper by Glen Weyl , Puja Ohlhaver , and Vitalik Buterin outlines what they call “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc): “a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales.” How do we accomplish this? According to the paper, with: “accounts (or wallets) holding non-tr

related reading

• Is "acceptably non-dystopian" self-sovereign identity even possible?blog.mollywhite.net
• What I'm frustrated by in cryptoamirbolous.com
• Soulbinding Like a Statesubconscious.substack.com
• Decentralizing the Builder Rolejoncharbonneau.substack.com
• Soulbinding Like a Statenewsletter.squishy.computer
• Degraded Blockchainsfortressofdoors.com
• Policy Proposals for Crypto Protocols to Make Them Less Dystopic and More Inclusivehackernoon.com
• The Ownership Economy 2022 – Variantvariant.fund
• Unbundling PBS: Towards protocol-enforced proposer commitments (PEPC) - Economics - Ethereum Researchethresear.ch
• Chris Granger - Musings and such.chris-granger.com
• Liberation Through Radical Decentralization | by Vitalik Buterin | Mediummedium.com
• The Web3 Movement’s Quest to Build a ‘Can’t Be Evil’ Internet | WIREDwired.com