What are Soul Bound Tokens (SBT)?

Like a DeBeers Diamond: Forever Yours

Soul Bound Tokens, also sometimes referred to as Account Bound Tokens, could be described as the process of tattooing your digital wallet, just currently without the ability to laser remove it. Now what you tattoo to the wallet is the real question!

A Vitalik Buterin co-written research paper was released titled "Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul". While it's definitely not a short read, the discussion of Soul Bound NFTs is a hot new topic that will certainly be impactful to future development.

The paper is following the theme of a post he made back in January 2022. Soul Bound tokens are a special form of NFT that are designed to be 'bound' to a single wallet, instead of being easily sold or traded like traditional NFT's.

There are a ton of applicable purposes for Soul Bound NFT's, such as identifying what people have historically done, providing access to services, serving as a form of governance token, identity verification token, and even determining future credit.

The technology and implementations are still very early, but we expect some interesting developments in the space. On a more technical level, the Soul Bound Token, or an Account Bound Token, is the implementation of EIP-4973. 

Here are a few examples of how a Soul Bound Token could be used in a real world application:

• An Educational Institution providing a graduate their degree directly to their personal wallet address, which would then be used as verified educational experience by providing a wallet address to an employer, like a digital ledger resume - academics identity verification.
• An Employer or Organization could issue a token of appreciation or proof of experience to a user's wallet, again to be used as a growing digital ledger resume
• The core of how a service, like LinkedIn, operates could be impacted (e.g. Kleoverse)
• Medical records soulbound tokens could be used to improve current systems, and create opportunities for improved research with open anonymous data. 
• For multiplayer online games, the token could represent a player's account, character, items, experience - whatever needs to be locked! 

Once you get past the jargon, crypto use cases are pretty exciting & the complexity shouldn't deter you. Cybrid helps unscramble the complexity of it all - which is why we are the C-Suite & Developers first choice for crypto.

We've provided guides to help businesses get started with putting crypto on their roadmap, which whenever you're ready, Cybrid is ready to begin the journey with you.