Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities\u2014such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands\u2014are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable \u201csoulbound\u201d tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of \u201cSouls\u201d can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem \u201cDecentralized Society\u201d(DeSoc)\u2014a 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. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms\u2014such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores\u2014that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today\u2019s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities\u2014such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands\u2014are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable \u201csoulbound\u201d tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of \u201cSouls\u201d can encode the trust networks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13548,13558,13559],"msr-publication-type":[193724],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-891015","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-economics","msr-research-area-security-privacy-cryptography","msr-research-area-social-sciences","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2022-5-10","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"Available at SSRN 4105763","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/wrenchinthegears.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Vitalek-Buterin-Soulbound-Token-Paper-May-2022.pdf","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"E. 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