Why Soulbound Tokens Could Revolutionize Personal IP

Your social capital—followers, reviews, karma—is locked inside platforms like Twitter or Airbnb. You can't port it, and the platform monetizes it. This creates a $100B+ market for centralized reputation data.

• Zero Portability: Reputation resets to zero on new platforms.
• Value Extraction: Platforms profit from your social graph; you don't.
• Fragmented Identity: No unified proof of your history or achievements.

SBTs are non-transferable tokens that act as on-chain attestations. Projects like Gitcoin Passport and Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) use them to create a composable identity layer.

• Sovereign Ownership: You control the keys to your credentials.
• Interoperable Proof: A DAO contribution SBT can be used to prove reputation in a DeFi protocol.
• Anti-Sybil: Non-transferability makes them resistant to bulk purchase, enabling ~90%+ reduction in bot attacks for airdrops or governance.

DeFi lending requires over-collateralization (e.g., 150%+ on Aave). SBTs enable reputation-as-collateral by proving credit history, employment, or educational credentials via protocols like ARCx or Spectral.

• Risk-Based Pricing: Lenders can offer ~5-15% APY based on your SBT portfolio vs. uniform rates.
• Capital Efficiency: Reduces collateral requirements, unlocking $1T+ in latent credit markets.
• Automated Underwriting: Smart contracts verify SBTs in ~500ms, replacing manual KYC.

EAS is the dominant infrastructure for issuing SBT-like attestations, processing ~10M+ on-chain and off-chain attestations. It's the backbone for projects like Optimism's Citizen House and Coinbase's Verifications.

• Schema Flexibility: Supports any data structure for credentials.
• Cost-Effective: Off-chain attestations cost ~$0, enabling mass adoption.
• Composability: Attestations from different issuers can be aggregated to form a rich identity graph.

Permanent, public SBTs are a privacy nightmare. Solutions like Semaphore for anonymity or zk-SNARKs in Polygon ID allow you to prove credential validity without revealing the underlying data.

• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're over 21 without revealing your birthdate.
• Graceful Revocation: Credential issuers (e.g., a university) can revoke expired degrees.
• Regulatory Path: Provides a GDPR-compliant framework for verifiable credentials.

SBTs enable context-specific capital allocation. A DAO could weight your governance vote based on your relevant expertise SBTs. Protocols like MakerDAO could offer better stability fee rates to proven contributors.

• Meritocratic Systems: Capital and influence flow to proven merit, not just wealth.
• Automated Networks: SBTs enable trust-minimized professional guilds and job markets.
• New Asset Class: Personal IP and reputation become a tradable economic layer, moving beyond the $10B+ creator economy to a $100B+ reputation economy.

Creators are trapped in walled gardens like YouTube and Spotify, where algorithms control distribution and platforms take ~30-50% of revenue. Your audience and reputation are not portable assets you own.

• Key Benefit 1: SBTs create a portable, user-owned reputation graph.
• Key Benefit 2: Enables direct fan patronage and micro-transactions, bypassing intermediary fees.

SBTs can act as non-transferable membership passes or achievement badges, gating access to exclusive content, communities, or real-world experiences.

• Key Benefit 1: Enables new subscription and ticketing models with provable scarcity and authenticity.
• Key Benefit 2: Creates programmable utility, like an SBT from one project unlocking a discount in another (composability).

Social protocols are the infrastructure proving this model. Lens profiles are essentially SBTs, and Farcaster Frames turn any cast into an interactive, monetizable app.

• Key Benefit 1: Content and social graph are on-chain assets, enabling new discovery and monetization apps.
• Key Benefit 2: Frames demonstrate how SBT-gated actions (like minting, voting, buying) can be seamlessly embedded into the social feed.

The ultimate monetization: tokenizing future royalty streams from your IP. An SBT proves you are the creator, enabling you to sell a percentage of future earnings as a tradable asset.

• Key Benefit 1: Unlocks upfront capital for creators without selling their IP outright.
• Key Benefit 2: Creates a liquid market for personal IP, aligning fans as investors (see concepts like creator coins).