Is Time To Switch To MetaMask From LinkedIn? Soon But Not Yet

All thanks to NFTs, crypto wallets will soon enable users to prove their authorization without the need of any third party background checks.

The function of crypto wallets has changed significantly over the last few years. They initially secured token holdings or served as art galleries with nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Today, they’ve become like bank accounts for many, and soon, they will offer even more functionality by enabling digital curriculum vitae (CVs).

In a May 2022 paper, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others introduced the concept of “Soulbound tokens” (SBTs). Buterin and his co-authors argued that credentials on a blockchain offer many advantages to establishing provenance and reputation.

SBTs are like PoAPs, but they are non-transferable and, therefore, bound to a wallet. Binance announced in September that it would introduce the Binance Account Bound (BAB) token as proof of identity for Binance users.

Another amazing project is the Lens Protocol, which was created by the Aave team. Lens is a composable and decentralized social graph that allows the hosting of various social media applications. Users receive a Lens handle in the form of an NFT, which is their user account for all decentralized applications (DApps). Every interaction with the Lens account is saved and linked to the handle.

By creating Lens and a trusted reputation mechanism for user wallets, Aave can start offering uncollateralized loans as in TradFi once reputations have been established. This is just one of the many benefits of on-chain reputations

Establishing a culture of confirming credentials on-chain and holding them in a wallet will help such people build up a reputation faster and allow employees to check on the CV, as trustworthiness can easily be verified. For this, the concept of SBTs makes much sense, as those NFTs should not be tradable.

Many Web3 projects have small teams without a professional HR department to check candidates’ credibility. But with digital CVs, it will become much easier to verify credentials.

It’s unclear if Web3 CVs will win mainstream adoption, as that also depends on the general adoption of crypto-related infrastructure and improvements in UI and UX. But we can predict with great confidence that, at least within crypto, they will become the norm.