Decentralized society (DeSoc): in search of the soul of Web3

In early May, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published the paper “Decentralized Society: In Search of the Soul of Web3” with economist Glen Weil and Flashbots researcher Pooja Oliver.

Notably, this article focuses on the new humanistic possibilities associated with the inexpressible “soul-bound” NFT, a topic that Vitalik Buterin has explored this year.

The article explains and summarizes some critical authors so that readers can quickly understand the basics of a decentralized society (DeSoc).

Introduction to Decentralized Society (DeSoc)

Main ideas of work

1. Web3 currently revolves around finance and asset transfers;
2. However, many conventional economic behaviours (such as “unsecured lending and personal branding”) are based on non-transferable social relationships that are built on trust and endure over time;
3. The authors propose to introduce the concept of non-transferable soul-bound tokens (SBTs) owned by “souls” (i.e. accounts) as a way to better code social networks in web3;
4. SBT will encode these relationships by keeping track of commitments, powers, and soul connections on the blockchain;
5. Decentralized society (DeSoc) will rely on SBT to allow souls and communities to come together from the bottom up, as each other’s emergent properties, to co-create multiple networked products and intellectual goods at various scales;
6. If continued, DeSoc could also pave the way for new ownership and governance mechanisms that reward trust and cooperation by protecting networks from capture, takeover and domination;
7. In short, DeSoc points to the current hyper-funded state of web3 and suggests focusing on a more transformative, diversified future with increasing returns based on social interaction.

Soul and Soulbound tokens. Soul and Soul-bound tokens (SBT)

• “Soul” is synonymous with an account, wallet, etc.
• “Soul” may contain an SBT that is non-transferable, potentially revoked by the owner, and initially public, while later uses of SBT for privacy will become more practical.
• SBTs can track affiliations, memberships, and certifications such as educational certificates, work experience, or a hash of books or artwork created by the owner of the SBT.
• SBTs can be created by the “souls” themselves, but importantly, they can also be witnessed by other “souls” as counterparties of this relationship.

Examples of Decentralized Society (DeSoc) Practical Applications in Web3

Artists can use their “souls” to publish NFTs; thus, they can mark their reputation on their work directly on the blockchain network. Artists can also create their SBTs for various purposes, such as linking their NFTs to on-chain collections for enhanced security and provenance. Thus, SBTs and the social connections behind them can help guard against plagiarism, forgery, etc.

Unsecured loans in Web3

In the space of decentralized finance in Web3, the possibility of using lending without collateral is almost unavailable. Therefore, SBT can use to create an independent decentralized credit system.

SBT can be a way for people to use their reputation as collateral when getting a loan without having to provide actual collateral.

Loans and lines of credit can be represented as non-transferable but revocable SBTs held with other SBTs. They will remain valid until they are redeemed and subsequently burned or, better yet, replaced by proof of redemption.

Social access recovery

In web3, users will not want to lose access to their wallets because, in a DeSoc environment, they will lose access to their “soul”.

Social recovery wallets like Argent allow users to rely on trusted relationships (so-called guardians), which is currently the best option for securing Ethereum accounts. However, maintaining a close-knit group of active caregivers over time can become tiring, so “social recovery” through SBT may be the best option.

SBT will track the community to which the owner of the “soul” belongs. Therefore, if the “soul” needs to be restored, SBT can be used for the broadest range of real-time relationships for security and not just rely on a few guardians. Some mechanisms for implementing this still need to be developed, but the concept is viable.

Airdrop “shower”

 To date, airdrops are somewhat inaccurate or inefficient for creating new web3 communities. On the contrary, SBT will allow the creation of communities of interest based on the intersection of the interests of “souls”.

A soul airdrop is based on the calculations of SBT and other tokens within a soul. So, for example, a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) that wants to rally the community on a particular L1 protocol will be able to make a targeted airdrop to those developers who have attended 3 of the last five meetings on a given topic, which will reflect in their SBT.

Protecting DAOs from attacks in Web3

DAOs that focus on community management face attacks when users have multiple wallets to get more votes when voting. SBTs will protect against such attacks, making separating unique souls and possible bots easier.

Flexible Ownership

Today, in most cases, an NFT grants its owner the right to use, destroy, or profit from an asset on an ad hoc basis. However, it isn’t easy to find situations where all these rights are offered to one owner in real life. For example, think about how you can use the apartment on a rental basis without destroying it, etc. Using SBT, it will be possible to mimic the conventional approach to ownership and create new strategies for web3. For example, the article’s authors mention the possibility of a local currency experiment where SBT could make the currency more valuable to hold and consume for souls who live in a particular area or belong to a specific community.

Why decentralized society (DeSoc) matters in Web3

• Web3 aims to transform society, not just the financial system. However, today’s social structures – families, churches, teams, corporations, civil society, celebrities, democracy – do not make sense in the virtual world without the original languages representing the human soul. But without this and the broader relationships, it supports, the Metaverse development is meaningless. For example, suppose web3 abandons user identities, trust and collaboration models, and combinable rights and responsibilities. In that case, it could face bot attacks, collaboration, and eventually a limited economic space filled with fully transferable private property that will evolve towards hyper-financialization.
• To avoid over-financialization while exponential growth, the paper’s authors propose strengthening and connecting sociality in virtual and physical reality, enabling souls and communities to encode rich social and economic relationships. But it’s not enough to build Web3 on trust and collaboration alone. Eliminating bias and a tendency to over-coordinate (or collude) between trust-based networks is necessary to encourage more complex and diverse relationships that span more social distance than ever. The authors call this a “decentralized society (DeSoc)” – a co-determined sociality in which souls and communities come together from the bottom up as emergent properties to produce various networked products at different scales.
• The developers of the idea emphasize pluralistic network products as a feature of DeSoc because networks are the most powerful engines of economic growth. Still, they are the most vulnerable to capture by private players (for example, web2) and powerful governments. The most significant economic growth comes from increased network revenues, with each additional input unit producing more output. Value-added networks are most effective when they are neither purely public nor private goods but partial and multiple common goods. Doc provides a social framework for the decomposition and reconfiguration of rights and the creation of effective governance mechanisms between these rights to build trust and cooperation when testing for complicity and capture.

Summary

• For now, DeSoc is still just a concept and area of research, not something that can use today.
• However, with the Ethereum network and NFT, the necessary infrastructure is already in place, and these technologies will continue to evolve. And the article on “decentralized society” presents the basic plan. Moreover, many projects are already starting to explore soul-related NFTs.
• Ether is the point of separation of hope – eternal, programmable, global financial and coordinating basis. It’s a bonfire around which we can build a cyberpunk world and a solar punk world.
• Critics and proponents often focus too much on today’s web3. While this is perfectly reasonable and worth discussing and working on, it’s worth considering the potential future transformations.
• There is still a long way to go before DeSoc comes into existence. Still, after reading this article, it will hopefully become more apparent to you that the future of NFT will be much broader and more social than many imagine.

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