Vitalik and others jointly published the paper "Decentralized Society: Finding the Soul of Web3"

On May 12, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, together with E. Glen Weyl, chief researcher of Microsoft Research, and Puja Ohlhaver, researcher of Flashbots, released a 37-page paper titled "Decentralized Society: Finding the Soul of Web3". The paper notes that Web3 today revolves around expressing transferable financialized assets, but many core economic activities—such as unsecured lending and building personal brands—are built on lasting, non-transferable relationships. As such, the paper details how non-transferable "soul-bound" tokens (SBTs) representing "soul" commitments, credentials, and affiliations encode the real economy's web of trust. At the same time, SBT supports applications such as community wallet recovery, anti-witch governance, and new markets with decomposable, shared rights. The paper refers to this richer, diverse ecosystem as a "decentralized society" (DeSoc). Key to this sociality are decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms that reward trust and cooperation while protecting the network from capture, extraction, and domination. With this enhanced sociality, web3 can eschew today's hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, diverse future that increases returns across social distancing.