SoulBound tokens (SBTs) are non-transferable NFTs that can represent a social identity and experiences in a decentralized society. Recently, Relation has initiated the Semantic SBT standard with RDF structured format, which enables an SBT to describe the social relation between two souls in its metadata. Therefore, Semantic SBTs have become perfect mediums for delivering people’s identity, attributes, experiences and concerns.

As Jessica Chang, Founder of Relation, mentioned in Relation Talk #6: “Web3 has created a movement to fundamentally change how we interact with each other in the digital world. SoulBound tokens (SBTs) are the latest emerging use case for blockchain technology looking to support an interoperable digital identity. With SBTs, alongside their applications and infrastructure, it becomes possible to create socially verifiable reputations and a more pluralist digital world of increasing returns.

SBTs can serve as a user’s identity in web3 containing different attributes. An easy to deploy SBT standard that creates massive valuable social data which could be shared and reused without friction are essential. That’s why Relation is proposing the Semantic SBT standard that not only meets the requirements above but is also capable of protecting privacy and preventing sybil attacks. With Semantic SBTs, that’s how we are going to implement the decentralized social graph.”

In Relation Talk #6, a group of Web3 builders from Relation, FirstBatch, Trantor, Port3, Kleros and HashKey gathered together to share their perspectives on the transformational effects that SBTs will bring. Their discussions on the topic of “How SBTs empower decentralized identity, reputation and social data on Web3” are recorded as follows.

Speakers

• Kerim, Co-Founder of FirstBatch. FirstBatch is a leading identity generator giving data-driven attestations rather than claim-based validations and enabling ZK identity scaling.

• **Hera, COO of Trantor. **Trantor is a guarded inter-chain NFT communication infrastructure in accordance with mathematical algorithms and multi-fuse protection.

• **0xKongy, COO of Port3 Networks. **Port3 Networks is a web3 social data gateway that aggregates off-chain and on-chain data to empower web3 Dapps.

• Guangmian, Integrations lead of Kleros. Kleros is a decentralized arbitration service for the disputes of the new economy.

• HashKey DID Official. HashKey DID is a multi-chain decentralized identity data aggregator powered by smart contract.

Question One

After the concept of SoulBound Tokens being stated for the first time in early May 2022, SoulBound quickly became one of the hottest topics in the Web3 world. Do you think SoulBound Tokens are powerful in building non-financial applications? And why?

**Hera (COO of Trantor): “**In terms of what SoulBound Tokens are, I think SoulBound Tokens are non-transferrable NFTs that are linked to certain wallet addresses. I feel that the concepts of SBTs and DID come hand in hand. In the real world, we have a passport as our identity proof in a foreign country or region to gain trust. Similarly, our DID could be our passport in the Web3 world. Then we can compare SBTs to individual visas representing achievements and experiences that we accumulate along the way in Web3. Different types of SBTs collected by individuals will define what type of Web3 users they are. They could be gamers, Twitter or DeFi users with all those SBTs publicly displayed on their profiles.

This will allow like-minded individuals to socialize, for example in social related decentralized applications. It is natural that SBTs will be important for identifying like-minded people. Besides, I feel that in the Web2 world, when people want to recruit someone, they need to vet through their resumes, educational certificates and perform due diligence. The process is time-consuming and difficult to authenticate the certificates sometimes. With SBTs representing a candidate’s achievements, the hiring process will be much easier and more smooth.

In terms of what we do at Trantor: Trantor platform itself will be issuing our platform SBTs for people who finish quests from some projects. These SBTS can be used for exclusive airdrops in the future. So, these projects can have a way to identify their early and active users. This is how SBTs are utilized on the Trantor platform.”

Guangmian (Integrations lead of Kleros): “The non-transferrable nature of SBT is one of its most defining features*. On top of being non-transferrable, SoulBound Tokens should also be bound to the soul: Not just to an individual’s wallet address, but to the person that is behind the address. One of the concerns of SBTs and people trying to create SBT formats and protocols is: certainly, you can bind things to an Ethereum address, and make it non-transferable out of that address; however, how do you make sure that people will not sell the private keys? Imagine that I have created an address, and I have a lot of SBTs and credentials, proving that I have a degree in law. And then, I get a lot of tokens on the address to access a lot of token gated communities, and after that, I sell that private key to someone else.*

SBTs become transferable off chain when the private keys are sold. And I think that goes against the main idea of SBTs.* However, this problem can be solved and one of the solutions is with proof of humanity by creating a game theoretical framework behind the creation of SBTs. As a result, it becomes infeasible and nonsensical for anybody trying to sell their keys. The idea is that proof of humanity is just one implementation of this and I’m pretty sure there are many more possible implementations of this concept.*

So, when you create an SBT, with proof of humanity, you don’t issue anything. The SBT is just a registry where people will check whether this profile is registered and if it is still in their registry. The private key can be sold, but the moment it’s sold, the person who actually owns the face is free to upload another profile to negate the initial SBT that he or she sold. This means that if you try to buy a second hand SBT, a proof of humanity SBT and try to build your reputation on that, the moment the original owner of that face negates the original SBT, you lose everything on top of that.

I think that it’s an essential feature of a good SBT protocol, and that is something that proof of humanity is able to achieve.* Once you can ensure this type of security, you are able to build SoulBound applications when your token gate someone into a community saying that this person has certain credentials. You know that this person truly is the person who has the credential but not someone who has bought the private keys or somehow managed to get it from somewhere else through illegitimate mechanisms.*

So, I think that making SoulBound tokens truly SoulBound is essential.* After that, we can start putting all these non-financial applications on top of that.*”

Question Two

SBT is considered to be the most important breakthrough in non-financial crypto since the Ethereum white paper at the end of 2013. What’s your opinion on this idea? What kind of impact will SoulBound Tokens have on the industry as a whole or what kinds of innovation opportunities will SoulBound Tokens bring, especially in the social and identity field?

HashKey DID Official: “SBTs are indeed an innovative output with a high value which may link with reality.* SBTs make it easier for institutions and individuals to join in and understand the technology and application status of Web3 absolutely. So, it is definitely an amazing future direction. In my opinion, decentralized identity and some other decentralized certificates which may prove the contribution of individuals in specific are very promising scenarios.*

DID is much more like your passport in web3, and the credentials, especially SBTs are much more like your footprints.* It means that this class of non-financial crypto may also provide more extension solutions in application. For example, HashKey DID has already hosted or co-hosted around ten events or campaigns with more than 800,000 users participating. This will greatly empower DAO communities building governance processes, such as application management permissions, personal credit ratings to mention a few.*

These are all chances in the future. Tools related to DAO governance, credit rating and the data layer with privacy calculating technology will launch at the end of this year and later at HashKey DID. These are the directions that we are really interested in.”

Kerim (Co-Founder of FirstBatch): “My point of view is a bit different and I think it is important as a part of a whole. In FirstBatch, what we are doing is utilizing source specific AI’s, Reddit driven AI’s and onboarding user interests and personas, hundreds of attestations in miles of a second. While we are doing this, users are creating all these attestations as they keep proofs, so we are addressing a privacy layer.

We think that we have to empower the on-chain data with the things that are not available.* If a user is a chess player interested in Figma, loves NFL teams or NBA teams that are not on chain, or available. And it is hard to understand with solely blockchain transactions. So, in FirstBatch, we are aggregating these interests and personas and making them on-chain provable. When we aggregate these off-chain data, the second question that arises with our perspective is, ‘There has to be a privacy preserving level and we have to divide the experience for two.’*

The first experience is the SBT part. The proof of person from these socials and instant proof of personas from these socials could be driven by SBTs. We are bullish on how to utilize SBTs with this kind of fully open point of view. As users want to protect their data, while having all the sovereignty, the second part is driven by an approach that has mixed SBTs and the ZK proofs which Vitalik is also bullish on. We are utilizing these kinds of data points in a decentralized interest graph that we are building.

I think SBTs and different kinds of data will see approaches from on-chain data but also from off-chain data sources. These will drive crypto socials and decentralized identity to build a comprehensive identity.”

Question Three

Both Relation and Port3 are focused on the Web3 social graph track, and we understand that Port3 has issued SoulBound NFTs to serve as the user’s identity in Web3. Relation has also released a semantic SBT standard to build the Web3 social graph data layer through semantic SBTs. What are Port3 and Relation’s thoughts on the application of SBTs?

0xKongy (COO of Port3 Networks): “From Port3’s perspective, the way we look at SoulBound Tokens is basically as your Web3 identity.* Everything you’ve done on-chain, every connection that you have built with others, every web2 app that you have experienced, can all be connected through your wallet. We collect all this data. We have one wallet and every time someone comes onto our platform, we can actually connect them to their individual social apps. For example, your telegram, Twitter or Discord, all can be linked to your wallet.*

So, once you get all the data together, you really create an identity of the person and how they go through the entire metaverse and Web3 world.* We haven’t launched our SoulBound Tokens yet. It’s probably in the pipeline, should be out by the end of the year. We’re actually collating and building up a community for it right now. Once we have the issuance of the SoulBound Token, our idea is just to incorporate everyone’s identity into SBTs.*

Then, the SBTs and data of a specific user can live on-chain and be permanently stored on blockchains.* From that point on, you apply the SBTs and related data to many scenarios. You use them for marketing. You can also have your personal information on SBTs that you can store and maybe use them like a resume. For example, if you’re a builder, you store all of your information out there and you can just send your SBTs to others as a proof. Then, people can see all the things that you have done.*

From our perspective, I think data is really powerful. In this stage, collecting as much data as possible is really what will help us get to the next level. By having a wide reaching SoulBound Token whereby you have the same community that shares the same SoulBound Token, a uniform set of data sets, your connectivity is going to be really seamless. That’s where we are going to head in the future. Essentially, our view and application of the SBTs is that SBTs will be your Web3 identity and you can really have many use-cases for SBTs.”

Jessica (Founder of Relation): “We think that SBTs can serve as a user’s identity in web3, and maybe a part of the source. People can hold many sources they have and different sources will make difference in the resumes. With the association of SBTs, you can view what the person is like and what fields he or she has interest in.

We have an idea that people may have so many SBTs on their accounts.* And people may have several accounts on-chain. In each account they hold, there might be a hundred SBTs, recording their past event transactions and fellowships. We are building this interactional graph among the semantic SoulBound Tokens. The Semantic SoulBound Tokens look similar to other SBTs. It is a variant of NFT that describes what the SBT means and it may have a graph associated with it.*

However, in the back end, it’s the on-chain data where we write the social media data on-chain, to take in the semantic meaning of the token.* This way, the standard of data models, also called the standard of data interchange that is stored on chains as well, will be promoted, based on an existing standard. This standard will be widely adoptable and familiar to many developers, so it becomes easy for developers to start implementing SBTs.*

Why we think following this standard data model and data exchange model is important is that, just like Kong said, data is valuable. When the community creates more data, it becomes a public good that can benefit the whole society from every corner. The most important thing is to make data easier to be mined and shared and re-used across different communities. Providing data sources is really important for the whole ecosystem.

Relation is proposing the Semantic SBT standard since we are trying to make this data layer that is readily native on-chain and easy to be shared and re-used without friction. That’s how we are going to implement the decentralized social graph. What’s more powerful is that the graph theory is actually a necessary fit in the SoulBound Tokens. For example, we issued two SBTs last month to prove the attendance of the TOKEN2049 event.

The holder of the Semantic SBT can actually read the semantic meaning; that this address attended this event, and it is actually in the short text record, pointing from one address to an event. In this case a directed graph link is created. So, by modeling these SBTs, we are actually modeling all those directed graph links which form the social graph.

The power of the graph theory is that it is easy to assign weights to the different attributes SBTs carry and to manage the correlation amongst all those holders of the SBTs. This way, it becomes easier for us to mitigate the sybil attacks or strategically coordinated behaviors. This is how we think the applications of SBTs can benefit us as a whole.

Question Four

Based on what you have described, SBTs are a proper model to introduce reputation mechanisms into Web3, so that the digital world can evaluate and measure the reputation of accounts. What problems might you encounter in the process of SBT implementation?

**Hera (COO of Trantor): “**Previously, the potential problem as Kong mentioned earlier, is that people may sell their private keys and the SBTs actually become transferable. However, this can be addressed via Kong’s solution. Besides, I feel like the whole model may be misused to target a certain group of people. For example, some groups may be discriminated against because of certain types of SBTs. For me, those are the main concerns I have for this model.”

**Guangmian (Integrations lead of Kleros): “**Well, I think there are two types of SBTs, those that you actually want and those that you don’t want in your name. For example, you could have SBTs for a law degree or attending a very nice event. However, if people are creating name and shame SBTs or undesirable SBTs like those from a corrupt official or silly person, you should have the freedom to unassign it from your name.

I also think if you make it too SoulBound and cannot be taken from your name, that could also be a problem. While SBTs should not be transferable, they should be destroyable to prevent the second problem from happening.”

Kerim (Co-Founder of FirstBatch): “Yeah, I totally agree. Some of the proof of person protocols that I’m observing right now, gave grants to users last April for personal level like three or these kinds of categories or hierarchical rankings. If a user is really genuine, and has like a hundred percent of proof of person rank, they’re probably going to show off. The problem is if you have the organic rank of 60–70% or 50%. I believe users don’t know what to do with it.

In some cases, users are adding more resources, more data to acquire a better proof of person level. So, I think the burning of the remaining of the SBTs is really important. I agree with you guys.”

Guangmian (Integrations lead of Kleros): “You can separate the issuance of the badges from the identity itself without compromising the scarcity of the SBTs*. So, people should be free to operate. For certain badges through secure and zero-knowledge ways, individuals can delegate those badges to another address that only they can. Sort of like a decoy identity to preserve their identity.*”

**HashKey DID Official: “**As you have mentioned, if a user does not want others to know more about themselves in reality, this class of SBTs may do the more privacy thing. For some rating standards, it’s so different from the organizations which may do these kinds of SBTs or these kinds of campaigns.”

Jessica (Founder of Relation): “Over publicity can also make people subject to social control.* This is one of the paradoxes that we are facing. Over publicity is a problem, along with over privacy. We need people to show up and prove something with their accounts so we can know more about this person. This way we can do the business and make plural intelligence etc. We don’t have a very good solution to solve this problem. However, we have some ideas on solving hiding some information from public visibility and protecting privacy.*

ZK knowledge is a good idea, but we still need people to keep it within a small group of people.* We are communicating with the link protocol and also Arweave on this project to make the private SBTs. It can then be accessed by a small group of people who are holding the access control around tokens so that they can view the data.*

We are very happy to discuss the ZK proofs on the SBTs to further protect the people’s privacy. A good example is people holding passports. With this kind of information, we can prove that this person is from Canada and female without unveiling the whole passport information to those who need to verify this.”

Question Five

What specific application scenarios do you think SBT will have? Especially in the context of your business?

0xKongy (COO of Port3 Networks): “Maybe not specifically in the context of our business, but one of the application scenarios we have been thinking about lately, is something like copy trading. Everything in the web3 space is on-chain, so when you trade, everything is loaded onto your account. So, what we are trying to look for is if you can actually give a certain wallet like a credit score or like a profitability score. We can then implement these into an SBT where we can tag certain wallets, with certain characteristics.

So, let’s say for example, if a particular wallet is a good trader, people can follow it, and you can do something like copy trader or web3 Etoro. I think viber has this right now but there’s no individual platform doing it right now. You can follow a specific trader who is doing really well and then try to make profit off the trades as well.

Alternatively, what we are also thinking about in terms of SoulBound Tokens is that you can actually create lending for it. So right now, in the web3 lending space, a lot of it is collateralized lending. So, you have to put something as deposit or collateral in order to get something in return.

What we are thinking is: if you have a certain SoulBound Token and you have actually worked throughout the entire lifespan. Let’s say this wallet has enough credit score, you always pay your debt and you have enough liquidity on it. You don’t have to deposit your collateral; you can actually use that and create a score for the wallet and maybe we can lend according to that. So, these are just certain uses that we see in terms of creating SBTs. It’s more on the financial side, but also because everything is on-chain, it’s more concrete and easily traceable.”

Kerim (Co-Founder of FirstBatch): “I have a few ideas connected to the scale of the AI space. Right now, many of us are using lots of decentralized protocols, decentralized publishing protocols and sending content on large protocols, CyberConnect or mirror, and these types of applications. We don’t have a great profile that other users can interact with, we don’t have great analytics, we don’t know what users are interested in, what they are writing on their own.

In these kinds of open socials, I believe the dynamic SBTs, oracle driven SBTs can provide identity by the content created by the user. If I’ve sent hundreds of mirror posts on Flash protocol and AIs are analyzing my content and they are saying Kerim is publishing content on Blockchain, Ethereum, basketball etc. These kinds of open identity profiles may lead to better interaction between users and this may bring lots of opportunities. This is one of my ideas.

The second one is on DAO, the decentralized autonomous organization side. We have a simplistic form of organizations and governance on the DAOs. With the data and these kinds of dynamic SBT approaches, I believe we can encode the social relationships between governance voting and users in a perfect way.”

Hera (COO of Trantor): “SBTs issued on our platform will be used for exclusive airdrops by the projects.* These are called SoulDrops, the projects have a way of targeting early and active users when they do airdrops, so it’s more effective. Besides, our platform itself will be issuing membership cards like in the form of SBTS to users. So, the users will be able to accumulate points along the way and upgrade their membership with us. When they get to the VIP stage, they’ll get to enjoy certain exclusive rights for members. These are our specific applications*.”

Hashkey DID official: “It is easier for everyone to get a mark of their own data or DID, on chain because all of this is public. We have already done marketing campaigns and airdrops before. It is really convenient for these kinds of special airdrops. A great idea.”

Jessica (Founder of Relation): “The SBTs can also help in the social recovery of the private keys.* There are many practices of social recovery, based on smart contract wallets, people have shards being distributed to people they know and trust. The wallet can be one, and friends of family, two or three. The problem is that people may lose connections after years. People can coordinate together to recover the key and bypass the true owner rights. One way to mitigate this issue is that the holder can issue some SBTs and let people of different communities hold a piece of this.*

For example, one shard can be owned by their colleagues, another by a DAO. I think that’s a better way to solve this kind of problem, to make social recovery more practical.”

Question Six

Sybil attacks happen in many cases. How do you think SBTs can mitigate this?

HashKey DID: “Most of the DAOs are built on discord or slack, these are more like Web2 tools. When they want to make decisions, Web2 communication tools are linked with their personal information. SBTs can help because they’re on-chain because they’re a really good solution.”

Hera (COO of Trantor): “SBTs can be like a form of membership for DAOs as well to prevent bad actors from entering and making decisions. In that way, the SBTs or like membership can help to prevent Sybil attacks by preventing people with malicious attacks from voting. So we can say that for voting, and make a rule that wallets with more reputable SBTs can have higher voting powers.”

Jessica (Founder of Relation): “We actually have a study on this. The Semantic SoulBound tokens can help mitigate this. The creation of multiple accounts by a single person is dangerous. However, there are many other ways to make this attack. For example, they can set up numerous profiles in one program. They can just invite their friends, coworkers etc. to join this. Because they are real people, it becomes difficult to figure this out in the attacks. These complicated cases can be dangerous for the ecosystem.

The Semantic SoulBound tokens can help with this, because through the SBT, we can study the plurality of the correlation of these SoulBound tokens.* For example, we are writing the social media data following the resource description framework. We are writing the predictive metadata in single words like; address A and address B. Listing all the SoulBound tokens, and listing all these words, we can just assign a word to it and analyze the matrix or distance between these souls.*

If we find that to be very close, we can just predict that these two souls are from similar backgrounds or homogenous groups. That is a good way to identify nested identities within this social graph of relationships. Many people care about the cooperation within a unique set of people, we can actually set a level or threshold. Say, a number larger than this will be considered potentially dangerous while a number below that can be regarded as worth the risk.

I think this is a good way to make governance more pluralistic.”

Question Seven

The concept of SBT is still quite new to most users, how do you think the SBTs can make users benefit from the reputation of their digital identity?

Kerim (Co-Founder of FirstBatch): “I think one of the most important parts of it is enhancing the user experience. So, we have found this on wallet-to-wallet messaging platforms and crypto socials. While users are minting these SBTs, with the on-chain graph side, main analytics and on-chain data, we have to provide users a great utility navigating through lots of applications. This is one of the most important things that we have to achieve. If users can understand the benefits of acquiring these SBTs, and acquiring a better user experience in many different environments, chains and applications, I think this will bring more and more users. It will also enhance the concept of SBTs to millions in the next few years.”

Hera (COO of Trantor): “From a user’s perspective, I think SBTs will definitely benefit me in all aspects. It’s more like building my resume in the web3 world. So, when it comes to the financial side, the KYC side, like credit ratings type, SBTs representing my reputation and digital identity will make it smooth and easy to do financial transactions in the future.

The users want to collect the SBTs by experiencing the projects and campaigns. Individuals also want to be the first ones to try out a project because they have great expectations for them, so they want to get their SBTs. So, from a user’s perspective, it’s going to be beneficial in many ways.”

0xKongy (COO of Port3 Networks): “The main thing we are pushing right now is our SoulQuest platform. The way we do it is by trying to collect user data through their history, and wallet transactions*. So, every time you go through our SoulQuest platform, and complete a campaign, we give you a SoulQuest badge, that way we can solely build your profile.*

When we eventually launch our SBTs, everyone can mint the SBTs, but depending on the number of badges you do, and what you get from different partners, you can actually segregate and segment people into different profiles. That way, we can actually give a rating or different segmentation for each profile from that point onwards.

So, the SBTs basically function as a history of what you have done so far with us.”

HashKey DID official: “We have issued some SBTs with different partners before. As I mentioned before, approving a user’s specific contribution in a specific ecosystem. These kinds of things may help us and them to do more data ratings or credit ratings. HashKey DID will have a governance token, so users can hold some SBTs from Haskey DID and other partnerships. They may get more governance tokens and HashKey DID have a high reputation fund called HashKey Capital, we have invested in different kinds of projects before.

If these kinds of projects may have more benefits or some airdrops we may consider our users first.”

Upcoming Campaigns

Hera (COO of Trantor): “On our platform we are currently having a model ecosystem carnival*. It is a social platform to connect website builders. We are hosting this carnival to further empower their ecosystem. So, if you want to check it out you can follow our Twitter where we have constant updates. Afterwards, we are going to have a Halloween themed carnival as well on Trantor platform. Do follow us or keep up with the events to come!*”

Kerim (Co-Founder of FirstBatch): “We acted as an infrastructure as a protocol that provides the fifteen different Defi Dapps and crypto infrastructures to build their environment with more fruitful on-chain data.* Since we have acquired these kinds of customers, also hundreds of thousands of users. Right now, we are releasing an application within the next six to eight weeks.*

The main thing is we are aggregating hundreds of forces releasing decentralized content in any chain. Buyer’s personas are with web2 and web3 data, all of these data will be created for you to navigate through Web3 to understand Web3 better. We are really excited to show these details in the upcoming months on Twitter.”

HashKey DID official: “At the end of this year, we will launch some tools for DAO building and DAO governance for the easy management and operation of the community. So, ensure that you are following us!”

Jessica (Founder of Relation): “We have a Read-2-Earn campaign that is ongoing. We have just released an article about SBTs and how it works, and how we are encoding the social relationships among the Semantic SBTs. We have several questions for the learners to answer, to get the learners SBTs, you can join this campaign, thank you!”

About Relation

Relation is building a Web3 social graph infrastructure that will host the next generation of billions of DApps, and empower souls and communities to co-build reputation and a better society on Web3 with SBTs and relationship data. Relation has launched Web3 social Dapp Relation ONE and the Semantic SBT standard which will create a chain native data layer that is easy to query, share and reuse with lower friction.

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