Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain, believes he has found the next big opportunity in the crypto world. He wants distributed ledgers to help create and manage our identities - both on- and offline - using "soulbound tokens" (SBT).
In a recent paper, "Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul," co-authored with Puja Ohlhaver of Flashbots and Glen Weyl of Microsoft, Buterin outlines a cryptographic tool similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that could be used as a kind of living, transparent and immutable resume.
NFTs are tokens used to give other digital media a kind of traceable identity and market price. SBTs are similar in structure, but would be unique in a person's lifetime and would not be transferable. The idea is a kind of ID card system attached to the blockchain.
"Imagine a world where most participants have souls [digital wallets] that store SBTs corresponding to a set of affiliations, memberships and credentials," the 37-page research paper says. Institutions such as universities would issue SBTs to graduates as a kind of digital diploma, or lenders could give someone a token when they pay off a loan.
The benefit would be a transparent record of a person's accomplishments that could not be falsified. (However, the paper suggests that SBTs could be revoked by institutions or burned by holders if circumstances require.)
In addition, these tokens could be integrated into the interoperable world of Web 3 as cryptoassets, which would enable a variety of "use cases." They would also give holders control over their important documents - a potential improvement over the current system, where credentials are managed by a variety of third parties and our identities are scattered across the web.
Last year, Ethereum propagandists at Bankless began circulating a meme that the MetaMask wallet (a popular tool for interacting with Ethereum) was better than a resume. The blockchain records a ledger of people's crypto activity, so if you want to demonstrate first-hand expertise, it would probably be better to show what tokens you own and what "smart contracts" you've signed.
Soulbound tokens work from the same perspective and could be ready for use by the end of this year, Weyl said. He and Buterin also said these assets could be at the center of the expected crypto hype cycle in 2024, similar to how Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) dominated 2017 and NFTs were adopted in the previous two years.
Aside from an inappropriate brand name, SBTs carry some risks. The Defiant, another crypto news service, reported that you hold the keys to your soul's tokens, raising the possibility of permanently losing your identity. Institutions could also send you spam notifications.
The bigger issue is whether we want our accomplishments and life-defining associations to always be visible. And, if you can spare the brief interlude, it raises important questions about who we are when we're online and whether we want our digital avatars to be copies of our carbon-based bodies.
Digital Identity
What happens when you die in the metaverse? Around the time the company formerly known as Facebook announced its move to the metaverse, some people started asking that very question.
The answer was quickly given, "If you die in the metaverse, you die in real life. The phrase and quote were often attributed to meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg and often combined with the image of a goggle-eyed Zuckerberg.
The origins of this meme are unknown and not yet documented in the Internet archiving project Know Your Meme. But the reaction makes sense given Facebook's current social standing and the company's business history.
In the early days of social media, as Facebook's penetration accelerated, the company was premised on the idea that digital identity equated to real life, and that transparency would unite and improve the world.
"I think [Zuckerberg] really believed that people should share more and that it would be good for his company, too," Wired editor Stephen Levy said in an earlier interview with CoinDesk. Levy's book, "Facebook: The Inside Story," published in 2020, argues that the company's fall from grace was the result of its massive ambition to "connect the world."
Facebook pages were public by default for many years. The company also pushed apps like Beacon that could update your social media status based on your location or activity - without your consent. Your email linked to your Facebook account was made easily accessible to others.
"User privacy was clearly a secondary consideration, and I cite numerous examples in the book of Zuckerberg weighing growth and 'sharing' over the objections of his executives," Levy said. Since then, the company has changed course, adopting stronger privacy protections in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Digital identity is a strange thing. In many ways, the people we are online are true extensions of our overall experience. In other ways, however, the Internet is profoundly changing how we behave or what we choose to do. Cyberbullying, for example, is widespread because the consequences are less severe than some experts claim.
Online identity is currently mediated by the tools and platforms we use. Twitter is different than Facebook, and writing style changes when you write an email or post on Medium.
The open metaverse is an attempt to connect all of these digital environments while providing real-life experiences. You're in the metaverse, not just logging in online. Static digital avatars, potentially controlled by possessable assets such as NFTs, could elegantly move from place to place in the metaverse.
By creating a permanent and controllable digital self, perhaps it can be said that if you die in the metaverse, you die in real life. You lose something valuable, since the whole idea is to treat your "hyperreal" self as an actual person (and not just an account owned by Facebook).
Buterin may not have been thinking about the metaverse when he theorized about SBTs - but the tools want to enable similar things. "Souls can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation," he wrote.
SBTs and the Metaverse are about building real reputations online. People already feel a great sense of loss when message boards die out or when their pseudonyms are removed from Twitter - and that sense could intensify if we manage to integrate more real-life attributes into the digital world. SBTs, permanent personal records, are the pinnacle of this development.
The extent to which we succeed in blending the worlds of atoms and bits is still unknown - but giving greater meaning to digital environments and people is not a bad idea. Many on social media know the feeling of being harassed or disrespected. Part of this is probably due to the geographic and metaphysical distance between people when they are online.
Of course, when one dies in the metaverse, one lives on as a living, breathing being. Similarly, there are current attempts to extend human life using digital tools.
Beyond the human
Buterin reportedly holds some transhumanist views, the idea that the natural limitations of human existence can be overcome. With the right combination of drugs and lifestyle, we could live forever. Or we could live on as a floating consciousness uploaded into a computer.
"What happens to a person's belongings when they die in the physical world is determined by legal procedures, but in the metaverse, code is the law," HQ Han, who is in charge of ecosystem growth at Protocol Labs, told CoinDesk. That's why "we need tools to govern the inheritance and recovery of digital assets in the event of death," Han said.
I don't know what's possible when it comes to creating eternal digital lives. I also don't know if it's desirable. I do know, however, that the digital world is becoming increasingly important - if only because people like Buterin are pushing that direction. Crypto assets, at their best, enable digital to actually be valuable.
So what happens when we die in the metaverse? What may be "more important," Han says, "is the guarantee that there will be something to leave behind at all."