Soulbound tokens (SBT) were first mentioned in a by in a paper published by Vitalik Buterin and others on May 11th, 2022. In the paper, Buterin et al suggest that even until now Web3 focused on “transferable and financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust”.
Abstract of the Soulbound tokens paper
Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships.
In this paper, we illustrate 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.
More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights.
We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined sociality...