What a timely initiative, I’m very glad to join the discussion here.
Like many of you, I’ve read the recent paper from Weyl et al with gusto, and believe that this standard will be transformative for Ethereum, in terms of social scaling, enabling new forms of ownership and markets, fixing existing applications (e.g. DeFi) such that they are fairer and safer, and so on. I think that this will take real-world experimentation with a very limited standard to see what works and what doesn’t; it’ll take time.
It seems like there’s still quite a lot of debate about the scope of the ownership/binding of these tokens, or other user-security concerns like loss of access. I think that highlights the value (A/S)BTs will have to users, but I agree with @TimDaub that this EIP should not consider this; i.e. don’t try to over-solve more generic UX issues here.
As @ligi mentioned, UX solutions like smart contract wallets do exist. Similarly, there are solutions for message-passing between Ethereum and L2s. If we leave revocability and reissuance up to the implementer, there are no new problems to solve here as I understand.
Re: the name of the standard, I’d invite @ligi and @TimDaub to reconsider SBTs over ABTs once more, with this in mind: the context of the effort is to empower human actors that use the network.
To quote the DeSoc paper:
Our key primitive is accounts, or wallets, that hold publicly visible, non-transferable (but possibly revocable-by-the-issuer) tokens. We refer to the accounts as “Souls” and tokens held by the accounts as “Soulbound Tokens” (SBTs).
It’s true that individuals can run multiple accounts (indeed, it’s the reason why Sybil is a problem), but I don’t think it helps to make that differentiation here. SybilBot Pro#2912 doesn’t have a soul, but it has an account that can give and receive attestations. What’s the difference? It’s that we don’t care about the accounts, because we can’t verify them as having Souls in the context of an ecosystem of these tokens and the users that hold them.
Note there is no requirement for a Soul to be linked to a legal name, or for there to be any protocol-level attempt to ensure “one Soul per human.” A Soul could be a persistent pseudonym with a range of SBTs that cannot easily be linked.6 We also do not assume non-transferability of Souls across humans. Instead, we try to illustrate how these properties, where needed, can naturally emerge from the design itself.
I think Account-Bound, while technically true today, does not reflect the goal of the initiative. I won’t die on the hill, but I think it’s worth a good re-think.