YGG TV: The Many Applications of Soulbound Tokens
At EmTech Next 2023, Beryl Li discussed a range of use cases for soulbound tokens with Amy Nordrum from MIT Technology Review.
MIT Technology Review's EmTech Next is a digital transformation event for COOs, CIOs and IT leadership that explores emerging technologies that are reshaping the business landscape. The event covers topics such as generative AI, web3, and Metaverse with a focus on how these technologies are impacting the customer experience, as well as leadership strategies for the fast-evolving digital workforce.
At this year’s EmTech Next, which took place on June 13-15, 2023, YGG co-founder Beryl Li joined Amy Nordrum, Executive Editor of Operations at MIT Technology Review, to discuss and envision the “The New Digital Landscape,” a future where soulbound tokens allow web3 participants to establish their digital identity and build their reputation without revealing traditional identifiers such as age, gender or location.
The following is an excerpt from Beryl and Amy’s discussion, where they talk about recent developments in web3 from YGG’s perspective and Beryl touches on real-world use cases for soulbound tokens from gaming through to health, education, and the future of work. Watch highlights from Beryl’s talk on YGG TV’s YouTube channel.
YGG TV: “The New Digital Landscape” with Beryl Li at MIT’s EmTech Next
Amy: You told me about a really interesting project you had going on at YGG to create a way to identify people on a blockchain-based service in a way that preserves their anonymity that isn't linked to their personal, real-world identity. It's using something called soulbound tokens. Can you tell us more about that and where that is in its stage of development?
Beryl: This is something that we're developing within YGG. So before we go to the reputation side, we're helping our players build that reputation through our questing program.
Quests are like these levels that players have to go through. And every time they go through these levels, they achieve what we call a soulbound token to prove that they've passed a certain test, they’ve passed this level, and therefore they're certified for that particular level in the form of a soulbound token in web3.
The moment that they collect all these soulbound tokens through all the achievements that they do on-chain — whether it's in Axie Infinity or any other game, or maybe in the future, other gamified applications, whether you’re learning on the blockchain, or you're exercising on the blockchain, and you're able to achieve something and record those achievements — all the soulbound tokens that your account is able to earn throughout a period of time, tells so much about you.
This is data without revealing your name, your gender, where you are geographically. What actually matters is what your achievements are on-chain throughout all of these applications.
Amy: Can you talk about some of those applications besides gaming, where you see these soulbound tokens being most useful and how you envision companies or other communities or organizations implementing these?
Beryl: I'd say that it's still very early, and since DeFi summer and what we call the period of GameFi, there are a lot of emerging companies or startups that are building throughout what we've learned in the past cycle, which are recordings of information on-chain.
I would say that it's now being adopted not only in games, but also in learning. And this is very interesting.
I'll give you an example of a platform where they teach you how to kind of like code, whether it's Solidity or other languages for certain smart contract protocols. It's kind of like Code Academy. So once you graduate from Code Academy, you're able to collect your soulbound token as well as earn those rewards for participating. And these rewards are actually a form of sponsorship from a lot of these brands or protocols as well.
And potentially, in the future, once you've completed all your quests or courses on-chain and it's recorded, you might actually be given a job, for instance, in the company that's building this protocol. So this is a very interesting, practical use case of soulbound tokens as well.
You can watch highlights from Beryl’s talk at the Yield Guild Games YouTube channel.
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