After the merge: Can Ethereum be a linked data web?

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After the long awaited merge shipped on 15 Sept 2022, the stage is set for further scalability, security, and sustainability. Now we can start to think of building something novel if the txs are 100x cheaper.

The SBTs proposed by the paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul is inspiring. To build something centred around the Ethereum Identity Ecosystem, the way to prove something about your account, or you can call it wallets or souls, is really important. There are some early movers already building in this field, like POAPs to prove the attendance.

What if we can go one step beyond them by making the proof of something NFTs public goods?

The current NFT standard writes only the tokenID, name and URI in metadata. The URI usually points to somewhere on a centralized server like AWS. Although the data is open, the machine reading of the data causes high friction. The friction is even worse if we try to build something that requires more intelligence. Not to mention the centralized storage is in the contract to data sovereignty. The numerous tokens become meaningless once the server is down.

A more decentralized way to issue the SBTs is that we write the meaning directly in the metadata. The open availability makes the reading of the meaning independent of any servers. And if we want to make it easier for the developers, we can write the meaning in some structure format, or even in some standard format like using RDF.

For example, if the SBT represents someone who is a member of a DAO. When you read the on-chain data, you only know the account is holding an SBT, that’s all. But if we add the meaning in an RDF format, the machine can easily know the account is a member of a DAO. And this is a directed graph link, linking the account and the DAO.

Consider each account is a data source that holds many SBTs, each SBT describes the relationship meaning in standard format and pointing to another data source. Ethereum is now a linked data web!

With more and more people creating their data in the format, the data web has increasing returns to all that can be easily shared and reused across community boundaries.