Web3 has created a movement to fundamentally change how we interact with each other in the digital world. Soulbound tokens (SBTs) are the latest emerging use case for blockchain technology looking to support an interoperable digital identity. With SBTs, alongside their applications and infrastructure, it becomes possible to create socially verifiable reputations and a more pluralist digital world of increasing returns.
What Are Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)?
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin first conceptualized SBTs in a co-authored paper titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.” The piece described soulbound tokens (SBTs) as non-transferable NFTs that can represent a social identity and experiences in a decentralized society.
In the world of Web3, participants have accounts, or wallets, that hold many SBTs corresponding to a series of affiliations, membership and credentials. The SBTs can be self-certified, and describe something about personal profile and interest. They can also be issued by other accounts that attest to the social relations of the participant.
In other words, an account holds the extended social existence described by the SBTs.
Though its proponents are still refining the concept and use cases, the paper highlights how soulbound tokens could be pivotal in creating a decentralized society. But while the existence of SBTs can create a social framework, there still needs to be a way to create the connectedness of SBTs through relationships.
The Semantic SBTs explained
The SBTs are some variants of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The current NFT issuing practice writes the tokenID, name and URI only in metadata. The URI usually points to somewhere on a centralized server like AWS. Although the data is open, the machine reading of the data causes high friction. The friction is even worse if we try to build something that requires more intelligence. Not to mention the centralized storage is in contradiction to data sovereignty. The numerous tokens will all become meaningless once the server is down.
A more decentralized way to generate the SBTs is that we write the meaning of the SBT in the metadata. We call the SBTs with meanings written in metadata the Semantic SBTs. The open availability of the semantic meaning of SBTs makes the reading of the meaning independent of any servers. And if we want to make it easier for the developers, we can write the meaning in some structure format, or even in some standard format like using Resource Description Framework (RDF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard.
For example, if the SBT represents someone who is a member of a DAO. When you read the on-chain data, you only know the account is holding an SBT, that’s all. But if we add the semantic meaning in metadata and follow the RDF format, the machine can easily know the account is a member of a DAO. And this is a directed graph link, linking the account and the DAO.
There is no doubt that the wealth and depth of the intelligence data that can be mined from the on-chain behaviors and relationships. The Semantic SBTs’ creating the data resources that are easier to mine. With more and more people creating their data in this format, the data web has increasing returns that benefit the whole society.
Co-created Social Graph and Linked Data Layer
The primitives of Web3 is centred around the wallets holding tokens.
Imagine a world where the on-chain behaviours can be recorded by the Semantic SBTs. You may have many SBTs such like:
· Attended some events, claimed the Proof of Attendance SBT
· Completed some course, claimed the Proof of Skillset SBT
· Joined some program, claimed the Proof of Fellowship SBT
It can also be as simple as you self-certify something about your account, like minting some Proof of Interest SBT describing I love soccer games!
The Semantic SBTs, each describing a statement of self-profile or social relations, can be associated to unfold the social existence and image of the soul.
The more promising point is, with each Semantic SBT describing a short statement of social relations between two accounts, pointing from one to another, the Semantic SBT in fact models the pairwise relation between two objectives and forms a directed graph link. It is theoretically the optimal way to map social relationships in a network of accounts with attributes. With numerous Semantic SBTs held by the ocean of wallets, the decentralized society is really just a gigantic social graph!
The graph theory is so amazing in the scalability and powerful in many aspects of our Web3 life:
· Recommendation of connections and interests in the Dapps.
· Detect the intersectional soulbound clusters.
· Easier to understand large amounts of data, trends, and relationships by business.
· Identify the coordinated strategic behavior such as sybil attacks.
With Semantic Soulbound Tokens, the building of reputation and trust will be easier with the bottom-up approach of self-issuance and peer attestation. The souls with more proof of something SBTs and more reputable SBTs will be more rewarding in many cases. Protocols that attest SBTs within their communities will find themselves benefit from the co-created reputation and trust of the community.
The social graph fits the connectedness of Semantic SBTs nicely, and it brings the perfect fit of a linked data layer. Consider each account is a data source that holds many Semantic SBTs, each Semantic SBT describes the relationship meaning in standard format and pointing to another data source. The Semantic SBTs’ essentially making Ethereum a Linked Data Web! Query of data can be done by protocols with standard language to get the return in seconds. When souls travel across communities, the data held by them can be easily shared and reused with minimal fictions. The co-created linked data layer is public goods with network effect and increasing return that benefits every corner of the Ethereum Identity Ecosystem.
The beauty of the Semantic SBTs is about to get off the ground and opens a wider door to Ethereum that are collaborative and semantically rich, and not just about finance. Relation, a data value explorer based on Web3 Social Graph, is setting out to create the infrastructure necessary to define and encode social relationships among Semantic SBTs.
Encoding Social Relations
Relation is a decentralized social graph infrastructure that empowers people and communities to co-build reputation and better society in Web3 with Semantic SBTs and linked relationship data. Relation is building an open semantic-SBT minting tool for everyone to mint SBTs and build their brands, while co-creating the decentralized social graph. The open and permissionless model is easy to use, letting individuals and brands start minting SBTs in minutes.
To make self-described profiles actionable, Relation is encoding social relationships through semantic SBTs. Through the addition of directed graph data that is machine readable, Relation Labs’s low friction infrastructure provides an environment where data can be smoothly shared and reused across applications and communities with the W3C standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) to describe relationships within SBT metadata. Beyond providing machine-readable relationships within SBT metadata, this also allows for a more human way of interacting with a decentralized society. Specifically, self-described relationships can let you:
Make relationships both public and private;
Revoke or burn certain relationships; and
Allow relationships to expire.
Though we assumed the SBTs to be publicly visible for simplicity, privacy is still the issue we have deep interest in. Private SBTs are necessary to protect private information and avoid social control. Fortunately, we can deal with over-publicity by storing the hash of the data on-chain and keeping the data off-chain in decentralized storage like Arweave, and control the access by connecting applications to on-chain credentials, like the token gated spaces. ZK proofs is also a powerful way to partially reveal data and compute over SBTs.
In a truly decentralized approach to SBT infrastructure, Relation is ensuring that web3 social is accessible to everyone, reducing the barriers to entry and assisting in the development of more inclusive relationships.
Relation’s Semantic SBT infrastructure can be applied to multiple different use cases, including SoulDrops for both Communities and Souls. SoulDrops are essentially airdrops that are targeted for specific SBT holders. For Souls, this is an opportunity to collect as many SBTs as they can from events, organizations or memberships, to strengthen their digital identity with reputation. For communities, SoulDrops present a “proof-of-things” solution that can be designed to make the airdrop based on what matters, like mitigating one user using multiple attacks (“sybil attacks”). When communities would like to make token airdrops to a certain intersection of souls or believe some SBTs are more trustworthy, the weighted direct graph can help to convene the souls and assign weight to the SBTs to make an effective token airdrop.
Most importantly, the infrastructure being created today for Semantic SBTs is helping reduce the need for intermediaries and creating a clear path toward a decentralized society. As the need for a strong on-chain social existence continues to grow, projects like Relation Labs are creating a social system for creating, maintaining and encoding social relationships that efficiently stored, and bootstrapping the technical layer of an unified and social composable, semantic data layer natively on Ethereum. The collaborative linked data layer generated by Semantic SBTs makes Ethereum a better and equal virtual society for all.