Overivew

Non-transferrable tokens are going to be critical for establishing reputation on-chain. Tokens could be granted for: working with a DAO, using a product in beta, or participating in governance. These reputation tokens could eventually unlock web3 work opportunities, grants, or under-collatoralized loans. Vitalik talks about this at length in his Soulbound article, and the Decentralized Society paper.

Context on Transferability

One of the trickiest aspects of "Soulbound" tokens is deciding their transfer rules. Making them truly attached to a single wallet is risky, in the case that the wallet gets compromised. Nick.eth talks about this problem here: https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson/status/1486462716558524418

ENS Bound Tokens

We propose that one of the ways to solve the problem above is to attach a Soulbound credential to another token that represents one's identity on-chain. For example, if you have been using Alice.eth for the past few years, that is an asset that you are building your identity around. You are unlikely to sell that ENS. Therefore, if we attach credentials to that ENS, we have anchored your credentials to you.

If your wallet is compromised, you can simply move our ENS domain to a new wallet, and then be able to move your Soulbound credentials with it. If someone wanted to sell their Soulbound token, they would first have to sell their ENS - which in many cases is extremely unlikely.

The Benefit for ENS DAO

Why is this beneficial for the ENS community? We believe that credentials being issued around ENS domains gives more value and utility to the domains. We believe that people will value their ENS even more knowing that they have built on-chain reputation that is attached to it.

Use of Funds

We have been building Metabadge for the past few months and are completely funded by grants. Recently, we were accepted into the Tableland incubator program which also operates as a grant format. We have dreamt of incorporating ENS as a possible way to limit transfers for Metabadge, and getting access to this grant would help fund that to make it a reality.

Timeline

We would hope to ship a testnet version of Metabadge in mid-august, with a mainnet launch on a few chains in September.