Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Creates Soulbound Tokens

Future. Ethereum’s co-founder and public face, Vitalik Buterin, recently announced that he is developing an NFT that, once given to the owner, can never be transferred. Dubbed Soulbound Tokens, the idea is that they can be used as an on-chain alternative to physical personal documents and proof of voting rights that do away with money-making speculation. Considering the crypto winter that is killing investors’ holdings, Buterin may see Soulbound Tokens as a way to save crypto’s reputation and promote its utility.

Yours, and yours alone
If you could buy an NFT that you could never sell, would you? That’s what Vitalik Buterin is creating with Soulbound Token (SBT).

• According to a post from metav3rse on Instagram, once a Soulbound token is purchased or received, it can’t be sold or transferred.
• That means the original holder will hold it forever, and it enters something called a “soul wallet.”
• The purpose of these soul tokens is that they could be used to deliver documents or other items on chain that users wouldn’t want to or shouldn’t ever transfer ownership of.
• That could include college diplomas, medical records, or even voting rights in a city’s DAO (something a city in Wyoming hopes to develop).

Vitalik said that Soulbound Tokens should be available by the end of the year.

Nothing to speculate
In a recent blog post, Vitalik acknowledged that a major criticism of crypto is how money-obsessed it has become. Vitalik, who many have noted is really a tech-head obsessed with innovation, security, and decentralization wrote that “people celebrate the ownership, and outright waste, of large amounts of wealth, and this limits the appeal and the long-term sustainability of the culture that emerges around these items.” So yeah, doesn’t sound like a guy hyping Bored Ape Yacht Club at a party in Miami.

To avoid the “financialization” of crypto (which, to be honest, Ethereum is at the center of) Vitalik says that the use of Soulbound Tokens could be “one path toward an alternative, where NFTs can represent much more of who you are and not just what you can afford.”