Glen Weyl, RadicalxChange Foundation founder and political economist & social technologist at Microsoft Special Projects, and Puja Ohlhaver, strategist at Flashbots, discuss “soulbound tokens” and their implications for collaboration and social organization in a variety of spaces. Topics covered include:

• how Glen got involved in crypto, wrote a book, and came to co-write a paper with Vitalik Buterin 
• how Puja studied economics and got in touch with Glen in pursuit of a middle ground between left and right politics
• what soulbound NFTs are and how they work
• how Vitalik’s paper articulated how the concept of the soulbound token could advance decentralized collaboration in web3
• how decentralized reputation can enable larger networks of coordination
• how identity can be understood through the lens of community participation
• how the name ‘soulbound token’ came about
• how these tokens could provide a technology for those who value scarcity but disdain speculation
• how identity-dedicated tokens could work on a technical level (including recovery)
• what is DeSoc and why is it important?
• how non-transferable tokens can improve DAO organization, including resolving issues with quadratic funding
• how identity-locked tokens can be protected from bots and AI abuse
• how these tokens could support community privacy and responsible information disclosure

 

Thank you to our sponsors!

Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021 

Beefy Finance: https://beefy.finance/ 

 

Related Reading

• Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul (Weyl, Ohlhaver, and Buterin; 2022)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763 

Georg Simmel, German neo-Kantian who laid groundwork for antipositivism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel 

How Blockchains Can Help Create Little Democracies Everywhere

https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-blockchains-can-help-create-little-democracies-everywhere/ 

 

Soulbound Tokens

• Vitalik on Soulbound tokens
• • https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html

• TL;DR written by Glen
• • https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/05/11/after-defi-desoc-finding-web-3s-soul/

• Other write-ups
• • https://nftnow.com/guides/soulbound-tokens-sbts-meet-the-tokens-that-may-change-your-life/
  • https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/soulbound-tokens/
  • https://fortune.com/2022/05/26/what-are-soulbound-tokens-web3-buterin/
  • https://thedefiant.io/vitalik-soulbound-tokens/

 

Projects Mentioned

• Ceramic

https://ceramic.network/ 

Verifiable Credentials Data Model (w3)

https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/#abstract 

Optimism

https://optimism.io/ 

Gitcoin

https://gitcoin.co/ 

Glen Weyl

• Personal Website

https://glenweyl.com/ 

Twitter (@glenweyl)

https://twitter.com/glenweyl/ 

 

Puja Ohlhaver

• LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/puja-ohlhaver-b44b878 

Twitter

https://mobile.twitter.com/pujaohlhaver 

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