“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul,” a whitepaper by researchers E. Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is published. In it, the trio describe a web3 where tokens denoting “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” are “soulbound” to individuals, and these non-transferable identity markers are used to govern more efficiently (e.g. DAO vote-weighting based on expertise) and to generate more equitable datasets (opt-in with privacy controls). Moving beyond ‘trustless’ DeFI frameworks, they propose decentralized sociality (DeSoc) “which encodes trust networks that underpin the real economy today.” Drawing on the community and infosec foibles in crypto over the last decade, they extend the model to prevent concentrations of power, and propose checks and balances to protect its decentralization.