Originally written:
3 July 2022
"Proof of Love is the future." — Overheard at DAO Palace
Abstract
Web3 allows people and communities to document value and digital asset ownership on-chain most commonly with the ability to transfer these values and assets freely.
Some organizations have been using forms of non-transferrable governance for many years now. See DAOstack’s Genesis governance framework used by DXdao and MolochDAO governance framework commonly accessed via DAOhaus.
Weyl, Ohlhaver, and Buterin’s The Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul paper brought more popularity to the idea of “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.
The next step in our journey is to create a system that allows people to capture, express and share feelings and love on-chain with heart-bound tokens (“HBTs”).
Let’s start with LOVE.
Let’s give people the ability to express love on-chain. There are actions that a user can take to start generating selfLOVE (“sLOVE”) tokens. At any time, the user can call the minting of these sLOVE tokens allowing them to come into the user’s possession. SelfLOVE is something that can only be generated over time.
Time is all we have. Where and who you chose to spend your time with is the most basic building block of love.
Alice can express love to Bob by sending Bob her sLOVE tokens, the single time sLOVE tokens can be transferred, transmuting them into LOVE tokens. If Bob receives LOVE from Alice, Bob can not send the LOVE to Charlie. The LOVE belongs only to Bob.
Next, because Bob has received LOVE from Alice, Bob begins to generate sLOVE over time.
This dynamic is similar to the system of Potato (an extitutional concept) where enbulbing and debulbing is a continuous cycle. It leads to a mesh or a network.
The system also has a unique phenomenon. Bob can acquire Alice-ness and Charlie can acquire Bob-ness.
LOVE can be stored and nurtured and this generates sLOVE over time.
This new system becomes an additional building block in our ecosystem, allowing for new types of relationships and connections, which can spur new types of communities and ideas.