https://www.coindesk.com/sponsored-content/semantic-sbts-encode-social-relationships-on-web3/
Semantic SBTs: Encode Social Relationships on Web3
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.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin first conceptualized SBTs in a co-authored paper titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.” The piece described soulbound tokens (SBTs) as non-transferable NFTs that can represent a social identity and experiences in a decentralized society.
In the world of Web3, participants have accounts, or wallets, that hold many SBTs corresponding to a series of affiliations, membership and credentials. The SBTs can be self-certified, and describe something about personal profile and interest. They can also be issued by other accounts that attest to the social relations of the participant.
In other words, an account holds the extended social existence described by the SBTs.
Though its proponents are still refining the concept and use cases, the paper highlights how soulbound tokens could be pivotal in creating a decentralized society. But while the existence of SBTs can create a social framework, there still needs to be a way to create the connectedness of SBTs through relationships.
SBTs are variants of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The current NFT issuing practice is to write the tokenID, name and URI only in metadata. The URI usually points to somewhere on a centralized server like AWS. Although the data is open, machine reading of the data causes high friction. The friction is even worse if we try to build something that requires more intelligence. Not to mention that centralized storage is in contradiction to data sovereignty. Numerous tokens would become meaningless once the server is down.
A more decentralized way to generate SBTs would be to write their meaning in the metadata. We call SBTs with meanings written in metadata “semantic SBTs.” The open availability of semantic meaning within SBTs makes the reading of the meaning independent of any servers. And if we want to make it easier for the developers, we can write the meaning in a structured format like the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard.
For example, if an SBT represented someone who was a member of a DAO, when you read the on-chain data, you’d only know the account was holding an SBT, that’s all. But if we added the semantic meaning in metadata and followed the RDF format, the machine could easily know the account was a member of a DAO. And this is a directed graph link, connecting the account and the DAO.
There is no doubt about the wealth and depth of the intelligence data that can be mined from on-chain behaviors and relationships. Semantic SBTs create data resources that are easier to mine. As more people create their data in this format, the data web can increase returns that benefit the whole society.
The core principles of Web3 are centered around the wallets holding tokens.
Imagine a world where the on-chain behaviors can be recorded by semantic SBTs. You could have many SBTs like: