This article serves as the concluding chapter of the Blockchain Civilization Trilogy, aiming to sketch the prototype of a Decentralized Society (DeSoc). We argue that civilization is undergoing a substrate migration — from the Atomic Age into the Bit Age. Against this backdrop, Ethereum demonstrates the potential to become a meta-framework for civilization: a correctable system where social institutions can iterate continuously within a low-cost, programmable environment.
The upper bound of such a framework begins with its most fundamental unit: the human being. This article contends that as RWA (Real-World Assets) gain momentum on-chain, the mapping of ideologies, cultural structures, and RWOs (Real-World Organizations) will inevitably require “Putting Humans On-Chain.” Individual rights — identity, credit, ability, and social relationships — must be credibly mapped, freely transferable, and composable in order to reconstruct social structures on-chain.
Accordingly, this article elaborates a DeSoc centered on the Sovereign Individual across three layers: identity, economy, and governance. Empowered by bit-based on-chain rights and asset ownership, individuals can migrate across multiple DAOs (digital city-states) at low cost, driving governance optimization and ultimately forming a landscape of competitive governance — opening a new chapter in the Bit Age.
Keywords: Decentralized Society; Sovereign Individual; Putting Humans On-Chain; Data Assetization; Universal Basic Income; Bit Age.
Freedom of movement is one of humanity’s oldest and most fundamental rights. Before the rise of nation-states and fixed borders, tribes and families migrated according to survival and security needs, selecting better environments. Migration served as a primitive check on power — one that did not eliminate power, but ensured it was always replaceable.
Agricultural civilization and state-building tightened this freedom: populations became bound to land, and the mechanism of irrevocable authorization anchored individuals to their birthplace. A dynamic, reciprocal social contract hardened into static constraint. Migration grew costly; reclaiming power became difficult.
Yet the pursuit of freedom never vanished, catalyzing two major historical tendencies:
Vertical Escape: individuals immigrating to freer, more prosperous societies under rule of law, actively choosing governance and services.
Horizontal Union: nation-states integrating to obtain higher-order public goods and to expand markets and mobility.
Both trends point toward a core demand: people continually seek environments where they can vote with their feet at lower cost and with higher efficiency.
Today, blockchain technology — especially DeSoc on Ethereum — is opening a third pathway: constructing an entirely new digital realm where the right to “vote with one’s feet” is re-endowed to each individual in a native, low-cost, and programmable manner.
This article argues that DeSoc, founded upon “Putting Humans On-Chain,” represents the latest chapter in humanity’s eternal migration toward freedom — achieving the ultimate dissolution of irrevocable authorization and accelerating civilization’s evolution into the Bit Age.
In works such as Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul and What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?, Vitalik Buterin lays the conceptual foundation for next-generation identity systems. His concept of the Soul-Bound Identity, carried by the SBT (Soul-Bound Token), is not a financial asset but a non-transferable credential holding one’s social resume, credit, and contributions. Its ultimate goal is social composability — granting every individual a recognizable, trustworthy, and incentivizable social foundation on-chain.
The vision of “Putting Humans On-Chain” is transitioning from theory to engineering reality through a series of emerging Ethereum standards (EIPs/ERCs). The technical foundation is the three-layer Sovereign Identity Stack, shaped by community consensus:
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), built on the W3C standard, give individuals full control over their root identity. On Ethereum, EIP-4361 (Sign-In With Ethereum, SIWE) concretizes this by allowing users to authenticate directly with their Ethereum accounts. EIP-712 provides secure, human-readable structured data signing — critical for signing verifiable off-chain claims.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) ensure claims such as “I am over 18” can be verified without revealing underlying data (e.g., birth date). Emerging proposals like ERC-5833 explore privacy-preserving and compliance-friendly SBT architectures.
SBTs, evolving from ERC-721, derive their non-transferability from standards such as ERC-4973 and ERC-5192. ERC-1155 introduces scalable, composable credential issuance. Together, these tools form an individual’s programmable social DNA.
Thus, DID (EIP-4361/712) + ZK + SBT (ERC-4973/5192/1155) constitutes the foundational identity infrastructure enabling DeSoc to progress from whitepapers to implementable smart contracts.
Identity experiments in the Ethereum ecosystem remain fragmented, forming “multi-source reputation shards”:
Lens Protocol / Farcaster: social graphs as portable, verifiable assets
Worldcoin: biometric uniqueness to resist Sybil attacks
Proof of Humanity / Idena: human-verification mechanisms
Gitcoin Passport / ENS: reputation portfolios integrating contributions and identity
These are puzzle pieces — breakthroughs in isolated dimensions, but not yet a composable digital persona.
Projects such as Credinet represent a deeper exploration: integrating MACI and modular ZK proofs to construct “Unified Persona + Fragmented Rights + Privacy Anti-Coercion + Decentralized Governance.”
Decentralized identity is not merely technological evolution but a civilizational necessity:
Industry Driver: credit, insurance, governance require trusted identities
Civilization Driver: DeSoc is foundational for Ethereum as a social contract layer
Competition Driver: identity infrastructure has network effects and positive externalities beyond DeFi
Conclusion of Identity Layer:
When credit, capability, and relationship networks become portable and composable digital assets, humanity regains a fundamental freedom in the digital realm: migration. Identity becomes the atomic unit of a new civilization.
When trusted digital identities become ubiquitous, a new credit-based market system emerges. Individuals transcend geography, evolving from digital nomads into digital citizens living within an economy secured by algorithmic trust.
When identity becomes trustable:
DAO members may issue reputation bonds
Developers can access trust-based loans
High-reputation communities may issue credit-backed stablecoins
Finance returns to its essence: the quantified expression of social trust.
Every creation, interaction, and evaluation becomes part of one’s reputation asset portfolio.
Knowledge can be securitized.
Influence can be invested in.
Collaboration becomes quantifiable.
The trusted individual becomes the most productive individual.
Trusted identity acts as an institutional bridge:
Corporate structures mapped to DAO sovereignty
Equity and voting rights encoded into NFTs/SBTs
Governance rules executed via smart contracts
This marks a shift from legal trust → algorithmic trust.
When trusted individuals are the atomic units:
Transaction costs collapse
trust becomes intrinsic and algorithmic
Cost of evil skyrockets
SBTs permanently bind behavior to reputation
Rule of law → Reputation self-governance
A Trust Civilization emerges.
Basic economic security (UBI) arises from:
Data Asset Income
(privacy-preserving data rights markets using ZKPs)
Node Network Income
(staking, storage, computing in DePIN)
Together forming the economic base of DeSoc.
Power has always arisen from individuals surrendering their rights.
Under monarchy: one-time, irrevocable
Under constitutionalism: periodic but holistic
When rights become decomposable, composable, portable on-chain, the ancient political structure is fundamentally reconstructed: power shifts from monopoly to competition, from coercion to service.
RWOs and RWEs are redefined under this new paradigm.
Each DAO has:
A written constitution (smart contracts)
An independent treasury
A citizenry (token holders, contributors)
Physical immigration is bundled and costly.
On-chain migration is granular and low-cost:
High reputation in a technical DAO
Core contributor of a cultural DAO
Governance rights exercised in aligned DAOs
Assets allocated in economically optimal DAOs
First time in history: comprehensive freedom of choice at low cost.
DAOs must compete for digital citizens:
Political Attraction: transparency, fairness, reversible authorization
Economic Attraction: tax design, revenue opportunities, public goods
Cultural Attraction: values, inclusiveness, creative vitality
Institutional innovation accelerates — just as in historical free city-states.
When humans are fully confirmed on-chain — identity, credit, governance participation evolving continuously as composable data — a society of emergent order arises.
Not centrally planned, but co-created by:
billions of individual choices
automatic collaboration of smart contracts
DeSoc = a bottom-up mechanism of order generation.
At the individual level:
sovereign identity, economic security, contribution-based development.
At the governance level:
DAOs compete for talent, forming an open governance market.
At the system level:
power is tamed; innovation is amplified; dignity and autonomy secured.
For the first time, society’s codebase becomes upgradable in real time.
A civilization reboot begins — reborn in the world of bits.
The Blockchain Civilization Trilogy completes a coherent loop:
We revealed the tool for taming power: reversible authorization, turning power into a service.
We established the substrate of civilization: Ethereum’s credible neutrality, global consensus, and programmability.
We depicted a new societal blueprint: identity confirmation → economic autonomy → governance competition → digital civilization centered on human sovereignty.
Civilization undergoes a profound substrate migration:
Atomic Age → Bit Age
Atomic logic produced geography, scarcity, and centralized power.
Bit logic enables global flow, infinite replicability, and decentralized power.
Identity becomes self-owned.
Governance becomes self-governed.
Revenue becomes self-enjoyed.
Lincoln’s ideal — of the people, by the people, for the people — gains a new, individualized interpretation:
“Of myself, by myself, for myself.”
This is — the Bit Age.