Can Blockchain Reweave Our Social Capital?

Vitalik Buterin's Vision for a New Society

Our daily lives are already deeply integrated with digital information. We wake up, grab our smartphones, check social media, make purchases with electronic payments, and work online. The boundary between technology and society is becoming increasingly blurred. But does this lifestyle make us happy? Is the society we truly desire waiting for us beyond this horizon?

There is someone who has been quietly and deeply contemplating these questions. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. In May 2022, he published a paper titled "Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul" with two co-authors, Puja Ohlhaver and Glen Weyl. The concept of "DeSoc (Decentralized Society)" proposed in this paper holds the potential to provide a new perspective on the kind of society we should aim for in the future.

Reassessing Web3's Current State

Today's Web3 tends to be skewed toward expressing transferable financialized assets. It is built around the exchange of economic value, such as NFT, crypt currencies, and DeFi. Many people might only associate blockchain technology and Web3 with news about Bitcoin or NFT price fluctuations.

However, Vitalik and his co-authors pose this question: "Shouldn't Web3 be able to provide a foundation that supports more fundamental aspects of human society, beyond just financial transactions?"

In our physical world, many activities such as unsecured loans, brand building, and community formation are based on non-transferable relationships of "trust." The "trust" and "reputation" we gain from friends and colleagues in our daily lives cannot be bought with money, but they are important "capital" that supports our social lives.

Could we express such networks of trust in digital space as well? This is the starting point of the DeSoc concept.

What is DeSoc—Expressing Social Relationships Beyond Finance

DeSoc stands for "Decentralized Society," referring to a society where people have their own non-transferable digital identities, freely participate in diverse communities, and create value together based on each other's strengths and trust.

It is important here to note that what DeSoc aims for is not merely the decentralization of information processing, but the decentralization of social relationships themselves. What Vitalik et al. envision is not a society controlled by the centralized power of governments or giant corporations, but a world where individuals and communities take the initiative to flexibly form society.

"Soul" and "SBT"—New Concepts Supporting DeSoc

At the core of DeSoc is the concept of "Soul." A Soul is not just a wallet or an account, but a digital existence that represents an individual's essential identity. And attached to this Soul are "Soulbound Tokens (SBT)."

Vitalik says he got this idea from the game "World of Warcraft." In this game, there are items called "soulbound items" that, once acquired, cannot be transferred to other players. Similarly, SBTs are tokens unique to each person that cannot be bought, sold, or transferred.

In the current Web3, the means to prove your skills and achievements are limited. Therefore, even if you actually have abilities, it is difficult to express them in a trustworthy manner in the digital space.

However, in DeSoc, an individual's behavior and contributions in real society can be recorded on the blockchain as non-transferable SBTs. Elements of social identity such as university degrees, work history, and community contributions accumulate in your Soul. For example, suppose you have programming skills. Every time you contribute to an online community, these contributions are recorded in your Soul as SBTs and socially verified in the digital space. These socially verified skills and achievements hold true value precisely because they cannot be bought or sold.

Why Did Vitalik Focus on DeSoc and SBT?

Behind Vitalik's conception of this vision is a strong concern about the current state of Web3. He was deeply worried that while attention is focused on speculative trading and the rising prices of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the ideal of "decentralization of the internet" that Web3 originally envisioned might be fading.

Many services in the current Web3 still depend to a considerable extent on centralized Web2 infrastructure. For instance, many NFT marketplaces still use servers and authentication systems operated by traditional platform companies, which clearly indicates that true "decentralization" has not yet been realized. This undermines the original appeal and sustainability of Web3.

Vitalik thought that at the root of this problemataic situation lies the lack of decentralized identity. SBT was proposed as an important breakthrough to fill this gap.

Furthermore, DeSoc positions SBTs not just as a technical solution, but as a catalyst for reconstructing social foundations themselves, such as social capital and relationships.

Vitalik Buterin—Will He Become a Social Thinker Recorded in Future History Books?

Vitalik Buterin's uniqueness lies in his position at the intersection of technology and social thought—he is not only an outstanding technical developer but also possesses an incisive perspective that deeply connects these two domains. He created Ethereum—a project that has had a major impact on the world—in his 20s, yet he doesn't view it as merely a tool for distributed data management or financial efficiency. Instead, he sees it as a catalyst that could reconstruct social structures.

From his numerous essays, we can see that a penetrating insight into society and a deep appreciation for each non-substitutable human existence consistently flow through the foundation of his thought. His concept of DeSoc is a grand vision of social transformation that begins with the reconstruction of social capital and can extend to the decentralization of decision-making processes and power structures.

Looking back at history, whenever new technological paradigms emerged, there were thinkers who deeply understood the transformations these technologies would bring to society and presented visions of desirable futures. Karl Marx, who fundamentally questioned the relationship between humans and labor during the Industrial Revolution, and Marshall McLuhan, who sharply pointed out the potential for new media to transform human senses and social structures during the Information Revolution, are excellent examples.

Vitalik, too, stands at a major turning point—the decentralization revolution brought by blockchain technology in our era—and continues to move fluidly between thought and practice, examining both the social possibilities and ethical challenges of the technology. It would not be surprising if history textbooks 100 years from now record that "Vitalik Buterin proposed a new social philosophy based on blockchain technology and was a thinker and practitioner who had a major influence on the design of 21st-century digital society."

What Should We Choose?

Of course, the concepts of DeSoc and SBTs are still largely theoretical, with experimental efforts just beginning.

There are criticisms and unresolved issues regarding these concepts. For example, there are concerns that personal information once recorded could remain permanently on the blockchain, turning minor mistakes or events from the past into indelible traces, potentially leading to a surveillance society. Privacy issues cannot be avoided either.

However, what we truly need to contemplate is not the details of the technology itself but the fundamental question of "what kind of society do we want?"

Do we want a society where economic benefit is the only measure of human value? Or do we want a society where trust and mutual contributions, things that cannot be measured by economics alone, are properly valued? This is a question about the future that transcends technology, one that each of us must address.

Vitalik's questioning might be directed at ourselves as we consider the future of society. The true value of his thought will become clearer through the process of social implementation going forward, not just through theory.

In the next article, I will delve deeper into the current state and challenges of SBT implementation.

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