An Open Synthesis On SBTs

Let me preface this writing with a clear and simple fact. I am not an expert. I am a curious mind and divergent thinker that uses writing to explore and process the things I am learning. Consider this an open API of my real-time synthesis of Decentralized Society - Finding Web3’s Soul (Buterin/Ohlhaver/Weyl).

At the root of the thesis, the paper describes a term called DeSoc.

DeSoc - a co-determined sociality where Souls and communities convene bottom up as emergent properties of each other producing plural network goods across different scales

Sure, this may sound a little fluffy, but the core concept is rooted in nature. I’ve written previously on the comparison of emergent phenomena to the mycelium networks that connect trees in a forest far below what is visible above the ground. Quantum physics also presents the concept of entanglement when two particles become connected no matter the physical distance in space. Both of these concepts are quite real despite our full grasp of their inner workings.

The study of holarchies presents most things as part of a bigger picture of wholeness, just like cells form organs, and organs are the biological framework for humans. Imagine the ocean not as a vast body of water but as a collection of water molecules flowing in coordinated and random movement. Now consider that each water molecule has relationships and interactions with other water molecules, and more abstractly, think about the exchange of information between those molecules somehow serving the connected whole of the ocean. What if that information powered a new collective capability for the ocean? If the ocean collectively controls this new capability, it sounds pretty interesting, but if a third party controls that capability and uses it for its own benefit, it becomes less interesting. Even more, what if each water molecule could control its participation and be rewarded for it?

If you think about it, with web2 (mainly social media) we are already giving away this information. In this case, people are the water molecules and their interactions and relationships are tracked and that information is collected and used by a third party. The social context of data is one of the most powerful pieces. Concerning personal data, convenience and privacy are inversely related, meaning that for the convenience of the frictionless connectivity to other people, you are paying for it with your privacy. The good news is that a new model is emerging, but new models that challenge legacy systems often have an uphill battle especially if the majority of users favor convenience over privacy. So, the question remains, do the individual water molecules find benefit in this coordinated capability, and are they willing to share information with the other water molecules to make it happen??

DeSoc presents Souls as agents, while web2 looks at those same individuals as objects.

The common thread of humanity can often be masked in favor of political ideology, religion, or a series of other divisive mechanics. This is what will make the adoption of DeSoc challenging. Most people are drawn to participate in something greater than themselves, while also finding comfort in smaller and more segmented groups based on specific belief systems. The key to adopting a concept like DeSoc is balancing the element of human nature that wants to coalesce with the less human aspects that pull us further apart.

Some other key terms in the paper include:

Soulbound Token (SBT) - publicly visible, non-transferable, and possibly revocable by the issuer

Souls - accounts that hold the tokens

Plural Intelligence - a method of sense-making across coordinated communities

The paper references the use of property from the Latin realm as Usus (use), Abusus (destruction), and Fructus (monetization). One of the ideas is to create a way to unbundle and reconfigure these rights for the individual. In that light, you are permitted to use, destroy or monetize the data that you personally generate. What if this could happen in groups? What if those groups were defined by the SBTs held by their members? The relationships between Souls could result in a plural intelligence that could power trust networks and even organize economies. With the assurance of residual rights over data and incentives to provide provenance-rich data, would that be enough for individuals to participate?

Programmable Privacy Isn’t Really New. What if “privacy was a programmable, loosely coupled bundle of rights to permission access, alter or profit from information”? Does anyone remember Open Mustard Seed from 2013 (more on OMS)? It was a project from ID3 and MIT’s Media Lab focused on personal data management and security. They outlined a cloud-based architecture using a Trusted Compute Framework (TCF), Personal Data Stores (PDS) and Trusted Compute Cells (TCC) to offer distributed social ecosystems to share resources like personal data. The theories of OMS and DeSoc seem closely related. What if you could control the access to your Soul just like apps today control their connections through APIs? What if it was as simple as a toggle switch on an app to manage the flow of your data and even monetize it? Crucible is working on a similar concept with their Emergence SDK, which is a “drop-in asset for popular game engines and web frameworks that provides easy and familiar access to Web3’s Digital Trust Layer”. While programmable privacy isn’t really new, SBTs could provide an interesting way to automate this process across a global community.

Possible Applications of SBTs

Offsetting Deep Fakes? If you’ve seen Kendrick Lamar’s latest video, you are probably equally impressed and frightened by deep fake technology. What if there was a way to prove something as a deep fake? Could there be a way to validate content with SBTs issued by the participants in the content to demonstrate authenticity to the audience? From a platform perspective, maybe when the content is distributed, only validated content makes it through to the audience? Or the audience understands that without SBT validation, they can recognize the content as deep fake. Obviously, this isn’t a simple process and it would require massive coordination and commitment from creators, platforms, and audiences. Proving authenticity and provenance is commonplace in the art world. Even vintage musical instruments require a specialist to determine the year and authenticity of a particular instrument. Could the process be automated to drive a similar result using SBTs for content?

Community Recovery Web3 adoption is still slow with less than 10% of the global community holding a wallet. Could part of the reason people resist decentralization be that it requires more personal responsibility? We are conditioned to trade that personal responsibility for convenience (similar to the privacy/convenience relationship). For example, with the right information, we can go to our bank or credit card company and recover our online password without much hassle, but we are beholden to the fine print terms & conditions and use of that information by third parties. Social recovery has been around for a while, but it requires specifically assigned users to hold their private keys, which could present the opportunity for collusion or challenges when personal relationships go bad. Community recovery requires a member from a random subset of the Soul’s community to consent to recovery.?

Social Lending If SBTs could represent a constellation of affiliations and relationships, could groups of individuals come together as a source of lending for others holding similar values? Just like information being an asset within mutually beneficial transactions, peer-to-peer lending could benefit from the network composability of SBTs. Since the communities are tight-knit, mutual success could be additionally assured by helping the recipients of the loan with human capital and personal expertise.

Rewarding Data Cooperatives Data is a key component of research and development that helps test theories, proofs-of-concept, MVPs, and other early-stage innovation outputs. Similar to the OMS project, what if data owners pooled their information and offered access to those pools to support innovation and invention? Even more, what if they shared in the rewards of the success of a new product?

Spinning Up Project Teams Going back to network composability, what if there was a way to quickly assemble a team of proven experts with minimal investigation and vetting? The paper presents the idea of Soul Drops, which are like Air Drops with a computational element that searches for unique combinations of SBTs within and across communities. DAOs could use this capability to power a rotational leadership dynamic that identifies and elevates members with certain superpowers that are needed to drive a specific season of leadership. DAOs could also use SBTs to control free riders or bad actors by revoking SBTs for members that aren’t fulfilling their commitments to the community.

Rewarding Collaboration Across Differences This could prove to be the most powerful use case with the largest impact on the global community. The paper references this quote from Elinor Ostrom (known for her work on the governance of commons), “ (the) problem is to help communities made up of imperfectly cooperative but socially connected individuals overcome their social differences to coordinate at scale in broader networks”. Collaboration with people that hold our same beliefs is easy, but working productively with those that hold dissimilar beliefs is more powerful. Wouldn’t this kind of collaboration foster a more understanding and connected global community?

Let’s consider the example below.

Contributor A - a politically conservative woman

Contributor B - a politically liberal man

While these two are opposites in their political ideology, they find themselves with a common thread. Both of them love dogs and work tirelessly to find homes for animals housed in kill shelters. Their names come up in a network composability search for people that can help build a system to transition strays to foster homes and ultimately to new owners. Both agree to participate and work together to create a solution that reduces the euthanization rate of dogs in that community by 50%. While these two individuals find their common ground, they are rewarded with SBTs that display their willingness to collaborate with someone holding opposing viewpoints, which will prove to be a highly sought-after superpower. It’s a validated way to demonstrate that you can navigate productively outside of your personal belief bubble.?

What about bad actors??Technology is a capability that can be harnessed for good and bad. How can we build protections into a system like this one? One example I found in the paper was to use peer validation for proof of attendance to address organizations being bribed to give SBTs that validate attendance or participation. The organization would release SBTs only after that action was validated by other attendees. Could those attendees be compromised? Possibly. Maybe you could take it a step further by requiring those validators to have a specified amount of unshared SBTs??

So how could this all come together??One thing to keep in mind is the delicate balance between ease of use and benefit of use. It seems that it has to start within small, trusted communities that already exist. As with many things in web3, it begins with de-risking small experiments, learning, sharing, and refining those experiments. The paper presents a chicken or the egg dilemma with either figuring out a community recovery solution or issuing something called Proto-SBTs that are transferable but revocable by the issuer. DAOs seem like a great place to start experimenting with SBTs. A simple use case could be applying SBTs to drive active participation with core community members. Active core team members are given SBTs and keep them as long as their participation remains active and productive to the community. Absentee members could still be part of the DAO but they would lose their SBT. SBTs could even be used across DAOs as a way to signal value creation by the SBT holder. DAO ecosystems like DAOHaus and Syndicate DAO could experiment with a handful of DAOs to test some of the cross-community functionality and correlation scores. Going back to the philosophical side, do the water molecules in the ocean find value in plural intelligence, and are they willing to participate to make it happen?