Struggle for Web3’s soul: The future of blockchain-based identity

cointelegraph.com:

The attention, one might suspect, has much to do with the participation of Buterin, blockchain’s wunderkind and the legendary co-founder of the Ethereum network. But it could also be a function of the paper’s ambition and scope, which includes asking questions like: What sort of society do we really want to live in? One that is finance-based or trust-based?

The authors illustrate how “non-transferable ‘soulbound’ tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials and affiliations of ‘Souls’ can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation.” These SBTs appear to be something like blockchain-based curricula vitae, or CVs, while “Souls” are basically people — or strictly speaking, individuals’ crypto wallets. However, Souls can also be institutions, like Columbia University or the Ethereum Foundation. The authors wrote:

There is no shortage of visionary scenarios about how Web3 might unfold, but one of the latest, “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” — a paper published in mid-May by E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver and Vitalik Buterin — is close to becoming one of the top 50 most downloaded papers on the SSRN scholarly research platform.

“In their simplest form, these SBTs can be ‘self-certified,’” continue the authors, “similar to how we share information about ourselves in our CVs.” But this is just scratching the surface of possibilities:

There’s a lot to digest in the 36-page paper, which sometimes seems a hodgepodge of disparate ideas and solutions ranging from recovering private keys to anarcho-capitalism. But it has received praise, even from critics, for describing a decentralized society that isn’t mainly focused on hyperfinancializaton but rather “encoding social