Edition 4: Tolls, Souls, and Roles

It’s hard to move on sometimes, even when looking back, you know it never could have worked out.  ‘Was it you or was it me?’ is still the question thousands of retail investors are asking Terra. The UST/Luna collapse is a breakup that’s already earned the (somewhat) comical moniker of ‘The Great Depegging of 2022’; last week we summarised the craziness. And whilst we tried to move on, a clip emerged in the aftermath, where Do Kwon, the ‘hard-to-like’ Terra founder describes how entertaining it can be watching crypto projects collapse. Karma = bitch. 

Bankless added to Milk Road’s Michael Lewis-esque narrative of the coin’s demise with a brilliant explanation in virtual real-time here. 

Why are we still featuring the implosion of a degen project in a regen newsletter? Simple: it matters to people who were liquidated. Crypto was hurt, the potential of the tech enveloped in toxicity, and the goals of regen possibly undermined in the public eye. And whilst the founder tries to resurrect the project in a new mask, the fallout from UST’s depegging will reverberate for a while. Yet, from the ashes of this, regens can perhaps show a different path, and help turn the game from zero-sum scarcity to positive sum abundance. That’s what we hope for. Read on if you’re with us. 

Disclaimer: we held a very small position in Wrapped Luna ($WLUNA), the size of which is not large enough to warrant this level of persistent bitterness. Our regen mission hopes we can attract the attention of some of the degens burned.

OK we’re over it now. That’s the final SJ take (hopefully) on this saga you readers will see. Time to heal before we download crypto-Tinder (again).  

Impact DAOs

Impact. DAO. It does exactly what it says on the tin: an Impact DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation designed for social impact. That is to say a DAO designed to create, feed and sustain public goods. 

Two books to recommend here:

• GreenPilled, by Kevin Owocki (with alpha from a range of wonderful contributors; we read this one first). 

• Impact DAOs, co-authored by Owocki and Alejandra Borda.

To paraphrase Kevin Owocki if the GreenPilled book was about the theory of regen, then Impact DAOs is about regen in practice. Currently the space of impact DAOs seems to converge mostly (though not exclusively) on ecological impact. That makes sense: environmental damage is visceral, and in part measurable. But you can also find projects focused on health, sport, inclusion, and education. 

DYOR and go get lost in the wonderful world of Impact DAOs. 

Here we’re going to (try to) decode Weyl, Ohlhaver and Buterin’s epic and ranging think-piece published in the Social Science Research Network Journal on the 11th May 2022. It’s great, and worth your time to read the whole thing. But in case you want it 101’d, here at Schelling Joint we’ve got you covered.  

There’s quite a lot to think about, so we’re going to split this into two chunks. The first is about the proposal for Soul Bound Tokens themselves, and the second (next week) is about Decentralised Society (DeSoc). Let’s get to it:

First something about the authors: 

• Glen Weyl is a researcher for Microsoft, an author, and a member of RadicalxChange. He is one of the co-originators of the contemporary application of the idea of Quadratic Voting, and consistent collaborator with Vitalik Buterin over the last few years. 

• Puja Ohlhaver is a Strategic counsel to Flashbots, and has a background in biomedicine and robotic surgery. 

• Vitalik Buterin is a co-founder of Ethereum, advocator for funding public goods, and one of the most respected voices in the crypto space. 

From here on in let’s label them Weyl et al, so we sound all smart and academicky. 

This piece on DeSoc and Soul continues a theme for the authors: how to use blockchain’s technological potential to effect radical and progressive improvements to society. 

The article, entitled Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul, is about overcoming coordination and verification constraints to rewarding individuals, whilst feeding and nourishing safe, secure, accessible, social and functional ecosystems. 

To start with, the authors detail some of the issues for users of contemporary Web3, for example that NFT creators still rely on centralised platforms such as Opensea, and users still mostly use centralised exchanges and custodial wallets such as Binance and Coinbase. Weyl et al also indicate that in certain contract transactions (for example leasing an apartment) blockchains are still largely obsolete, unable to offer usable solutions, given that tokens are transferrable to any third party (your landlord doesn’t want you transferring occupancy of their apartment to your mate Dave who you met down the pub and bought your lease for 0.5 Eth). 

The concept that the writers propose as a start-gun to remedy these problems of the state of Web3 now is ‘Souls’. These souls have tokens which are bound to them, and to begin with (for good reason we will come to) non-transferrable. 

Soul Bound Tokens (SBTs) started to feature in the canon of ideas around Ethereum in early 2022. In search of a more ‘pluralistic’ future for DAOs, developers from Gitcoin to independents have responded, building solutions for iteration.

So, what is a soul? Souls are essentially wallets. Tokens 'bound' to these souls (in other words, held within the wallets) are not hyper-financialised assets but instead represent a kind of extended CV or resume detailing: 

• Provenance (or origin of)

• Community verified reputation

• Potential viability for access to finance 

• Key management (as in the unique identity of your wallet)

• Other cool things that offer solutions to functional challenges for blockchains

Where do these tokens come from? They are basically issued by other wallets (other souls that is) to attest to the credentials denominated by the SBTs in yours. So, imagine you attend a course at university, or participate in a conference. Perhaps you spoke at an Eth seminar. Maybe you completed a repayment of a loan, or completed a task. In each case, SBTs would be issued to your soul (your wallet) to confirm that these things happened. It’s essentially a development of the proposal for soul-bound NFTs as POAPs (Proof of Attendance Protocol) that Vitalik Buterin discussed in January 2022. 

Weyl et al then sketch out a variety of use cases on a progressively ambitious ‘stairway’ to what decentralised society could look like. These uses include art, finance, education, certification, community-based wallet recovery, ownership and what they call ‘souldrops’. These drops would deploy SBTs to summon a particular community around say, forestation, perhaps to souls who hold SBTs that confirm their attendance at a minimum number of forestry conferences, or to those who hold a natural asset management degree. Souldrops are essentially more functionally useful and accurate airdrops with a higher probability they will be used to the originally intended effect. 

To wrap this all up, SBTs are tokens which overcome some of the systemic weaknesses around coordination inherent in some blockchains. They also increase the chances that people will onboard into Web3 by taking things that are very important IRL (like provable certification, some contracts, and of course your reputation) and creating a token that attests to the existence of these on-chain. At the same time the idea of SBTs could increase security and recoverability of wallets. 

There’s already a lot of discussion of SBTs on Discord, and a number of response pieces. Let’s come back to these next week when we look at what this means for the second big idea in Weyl et al’s work: Decentralized Society (‘DeSoc’; unrelated to going barefoot). 

Didn’t you just read that leviathan above? Chill out please. 

Totems are back in two weeks’ time. Weyl et al finished us with SBTs and DeSoc. Think of this like being a social-science undergrad when they give you a week off to read the brilliant and baffling Immanuel Kant. 

This week we want to exclusively feature some roles in the inspirational Regen Network.

Product Manager – Ecological Data

Product Manager – Cosmos SDK

Technical Recruiter

Front-End Engineer (Blockchain Experience) 

Software Engineer (Golang/Blockchain)

Senior Golang Engineer – Cosmos SDK

Developer Relations Engineer – Cosmos SDK

Senior Golang Engineer – Regen Ledger

Human Resources (HR) Manager 

We are keen to improve this newsletter and a core part of that is listening to the readers.... you! So if you have some feedback on what we could improve, or even what you love reading here, DM us on twitter 

Thanks for reading!