How Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) Can Improve Society With Web 3.0

There are growing concerns in many online spaces relating to altered or fake identities, false or incomplete information and other issues with factual data. These concerns tie into many aspects of society. In fact, they impact everything from gaming and social media to the medical industry, employment, finances and more. Soulbound tokens are an exciting advancement in Web 3.0 tech directly tackling this issue. They offer the promise of bringing verifiable digital records into a variety of real-world environments. These soulbound NFTs are exclusively tied to the holder, which yields tremendous benefits. Let’s take a closer look at SBTs.

What Are SBTs?

Soulbound tokens (SBTs) are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are permanently linked to the user. Because they’re unique and non-transferrable, SBTs offer beneficial applications in both digital and real-world environments.

Vitalik Buterin is well-known in the cryptocurrency world as the creator of Ethereum, which is the largest programmable blockchain and has the second-largest market cap behind Bitcoin (BTC). While playing the World of Warcraft game, Buterin came up with the idea of non-transferable tokens. Although tokens and NFTs are transferable as assets, Buterin was interested in using them as a type of proof, rather than assets per se. Not long after, Buterin published a paper detailing a decentralized society which he described as an augmented space based on soulbound tokens. The concept of Web 3.0 is established on the idea of a decentralized society.

What are soulbound tokens? SBT are best described as digital tokens that can be publicly verified. These non-transferable tokens hold critical information about a Soul, or individual entity. This information could include real-life employment history, skills, credentials, education, memberships and more. On a more significant level, SBTs enable a variety of other applications to come together in a decentralized society which draws on merging the properties of both “Souls” and communities. This confluence results in the co-creation of a pluralized network of intelligence and goods. In this decentralized society, a combination of advanced governance features and decomposable property rights collectively reward cooperation and trust. At the same time, they protect the network of goods and intelligence from penetration and damage.