Not before a LOT of thinking, that is.

One feature of the World of Warcraft game (WoW), I read here is the concept of soulbound items: “A soulbound item, once picked up, cannot be transferred or sold to another player."

This is good for WoW players because, quoting again:

“You can’t just go kill boars ten hours a day for a year, get thousands of gold, and buy the epic magic armor from other players who killed the dragon for you."

That is, if you can show off a soulbound item in the game, it proves that YOU are good at it. However…

“Of course, the system is very imperfect: you could just pay a team of professionals to kill the dragon with you and let you collect the loot, or even outright buy a character on a secondary market, and do this all with out-of-game US dollars so you don’t even have to kill boars. But even still, it makes for a much better game than every item always having a price."

OK. Inside games, that is

Stuff that happens exclusively inside has the advantage that it stays there. Yes, this is an approximation, but it’s good enough for the purpose of this post.

The problem is applying the same concept to something that still is, much more often than not, a way to part gullible folks from their money.

• “What if NFTs could be soulbound?"
• “What if we want to create NFTs that are not just about who has the most money, and that actually try to signal something else?"

That “something else” could be, according to that post, things like:

1. Proof of attendance to events
2. Governance rights, that is voting power over some organization, community, or single issue

The first use case may be not so harmful, or cause of controversies and trouble. Except in cases like, as the post itself mentions stuff like “being vaccinated” (or not) becomes publicly, always visibile through mechanisms like this.

The second use case… Anything that is 100% digital can be hacked. I am not sure what real advantages it would bring, or how often, or in how many real-world cases.

So, soulbound NFTs may be much less hype, much more useful in real life than all the other NFT “applications” seen so far. And it is at least interesting, and stimulating, to know that stuff like them could exist. Still, they need much, much more thinking before going for them for real.