Too much focus on tokenizing assets rather than encoding social trust relationships is a major complaint about the current state of Web3, and Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and E. Glen Weyl found a clear voice in a paper published in mid-2022 and Puja Oh lhaver . The paper, "The Decentralized Society: Searching for the Soul of Web3," explores soul-bound tokens (SBTs), a unique form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that represent user credentials.
Due to their non-transferrable design, SBTs have the potential to play a key role in building decentralized societies, according to the authors. However, while SBT verifies an individual's seniority, affiliation, and commitment, it lacks the social context needed for a decentralized ized society it alone represents only half the answer. A decentralized social graph acts as a bridge between SBT and society by representing each user's network of interconnected relationships across social networks. Combined with publicly verifiable SBT, a decentralized social graph presents an opportunity to give users greater control over their online identities while addressing the privacy, security, and ownership concerns common to centralized social networks.
According to the 2022 report, social media became the dominant use case for the internet in the 2010s, with a global user base of 4.7 billion. Even adding a fraction of the Web2 user base to Web3 would expand the blockchain and crypto ecosystem by a significant gap.
Social networks can benefit from the openness and decentralization of blockchain technology, returning control and sovereignty to users. However, while it is relatively easy to integrate blockchain into a social network, people rarely use just one social media platform. In fact, according to research , the average user spends time on more than six different social networks. Since blockchains don't yet have something like the web's HTTP protocol or social networks' OAuth, interoperability becomes a major challenge. Web3 startups are now racing to find the ideal balance of interoperability, privacy, and user-centric data ownership to bring the next billion people into a decentralized society. To enable users to create online identities with a social context, Hong Kong-based Web3 company Relation Labs,backed by digital asset financial services group HashKey, has developed Semantic SBT, also known as EIP-6239, on Ethereum. The "semantic layer" on top of SBT enables machines to understand complex actions in a subject/predicate/object fashion. When a person follows another person on Twitter, a machine can understand this by defining follower as the subject, the act of following as the predicate, and the user being followed as the object. Combined with the social connections between people, semantics enables a machine or algor ithm to map out social interconnections.A machine can understand this by defining follower as the subject, the act of following as the predicate, and the user being followed as the object. Combined with the social connections between people, semantics enables a machine or algorithm to map out social interconnections .A machine can understand this by defining follower as the subject, the act of following as the predicate, and the user being followed as the object. Combined with the social connections between people, semantics enables a machine or algorithm to map out social interconnections .
Similarly, Semantic SBT captures social information, including connections to individual wallet addresses, endorsements, or network contributions, with or without a profile name, to represent an individual's identity with social context as an asset. These social assets le verage the core principles of the blockchain decentralization, immutability, and transparency to give Web3 users control over their social data and interactions.
