Sharkz Soulbound 101

5 min readJul 15, 2022

Sharkz Entertainment’s launch of the first of its kind experiment of decentralized governance in the NFT space is just around the corner. The good news? Everyone’s invited to participate. Here’s what’s going on.

WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT?

Our Voting dApp (Sharkz Referendum) will soon be deployed and become available to the public. Before casting your vote, you must first claim a free and unique Soul ID NFT on our website. The Soul ID will allow you to participate in Sharkz governance. Before we dig into the details, it’s important to recognize that this is a web3 experiment. There will be more questions than answers along the way, but we have the guardrails in place to potentially build something magical together.

HOW DOES IT WORK TECHNICALLY?

We are introducing a new Soulbound solution to the NFT ecosystem. Here’s how it works. There are two smart contracts in place. First is the ERC4973-Soul Container, which allows for a wallet to be assigned to a unique NFT, the Soul ID. All holders of our Soul ID can participate in collective governance over Sharkz Entertainment. The second is ERC5114, which creates and links a Soul Badge perpetually to a Soul ID. Together they are tooling for our governance dApp — Sharkz Referendum.

WHAT DOES OWNING A SOUL ID ACTUALLY MEAN?

Your Soul ID is the way to join our experiment in decentralized governance of Sharkz Entertainment. It is your NFT, but not a regular NFT that you can trade or transfer. A Soul ID permanently stores your Soul Badges obtained from the ecosystem of Sharkz Entertainment.

HOW TO CLAIM THE SOUL ID?

Anyone can claim a Soul ID on our website, there are no restrictions. The Soul ID is free (+gas fee). Once you have a Soul ID in your wallet, you are then eligible to vote and participate in the governance of Sharkz Entertainment. If you don’t want to keep the Soul ID, you can simply burn it on Etherscan.

WHAT ABOUT SOUL BADGES?

A Soul Badge is an ERC-5114 Token, which adheres to your Soul ID permanently. You can collect Soul Badges by attending IRL Sharkz event, voting for a Sharkz proposal, or minting our NFTs, etc. In the next phase, Soul Badges will be useful tooling for things like when we do weighted voting systems and selective airdrops of our next NFT collections. Accumulation of Soul Badges will increase the voting power for that Soul ID.

WHY DO THIS TO SHARKZ ENTERTAINMENT?

Sharkz Entertainment is a community owned Brand3 which aims to push the boundaries in the NFT space. This means taking risks and being creative with what NFT technology enables. We’re flipping the script on how traditional IP is built by providing governance utility to holders from the beginning. Soulbound will be the first of many experiments to come as we build together. “DeSoc does not need to be perfect to pass the test of being acceptably non-dystopian; to be a paradigm worth exploring it merely needs to be better than the available alternatives.” — quote from “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul”

WHO CAN VOTE?

Each person can only have one Soul ID, and each Soul ID holder will have one vote. Our Voting dApp functions and connects seamlessly with our ERC4973-Soul Container smart contract. The Sharkz team decides on the first few Proposals to start, but will abstain from deciding on the future Proposals. The Sharkz team will only intervene to counter malicious proposals in the future.

WHAT ARE CONSIDERED MALICIOUS PROPOSALS?

Proposals that intend to end the experiment, that are against the community rules, or that fall out of the experiment scope.

WHAT IS A SOUL RECOVERY?

When someone loses their wallet, the Soul ID can be relocated to a different wallet. We call it Soul Recovery. You can set a number of Guardian wallet addresses after you have claimed the Soul ID. There is a threshold of 2 Guardian signatures to sign off the Soul Recovery function.

HOW GOVERNANCE WORKS?

At the start of the experiment, most of the voting Proposals will come from the Sharkz team. Once we work out the kinks in the initial phase, our intention is to gradually open up that governance to Soul ID holders. After we have a few executed Proposals under our belt, the new Proposals will be decided by the Sharkz community. Soulbound will evolve as we all become more familiar with the structure and continue to iterate on our model. Through experimentation, we hope to push the space forward and encourage other projects to take risks and innovate as well.