The platforms no one told you about that are hiding your next big freelance project!

Hey, friends! Kirsten here.

When I started freelancing, I wasn’t sure what platforms to use, so I tried them all! These are the ones my friends and I have found new clients on:

1. Upwork
⭐️ World’s biggest freelance marketplace

2. Freelancer.com
⭐️ Long-standing freelance marketplace with lower fees

3. Fiverr
⭐️ Freelance platform mostly geared towards creatives
⭐️ Freelancers list service packages, and clients purchase

4. Toptal
⭐️ “Premium” freelance platform

5. Designhill
⭐️ Marketplace for creatives

6. Workana
⭐️ Platform specialized in developers

7. Contra
⭐️ A commission-free freelance platform
⭐ Pay a monthly subscription to access

8. Malt
⭐️ French localized freelance marketplace

9. Collective.work
⭐️ France localized freelance collective platform with 0% commission

10. SoyFreelancer
⭐️ LATAM based freelance platform

11. WriterAccess
⭐️ Freelance writer platform

12. Lemon.io
⭐️ Premium freelance platform for developers

13. Gun.io
⭐️ Premium freelance platform for “world-class engineers”

14. Revyou
⭐️ The link-in-bio for freelancers; a portfolio for your work and client reviews

15. 99designs
⭐️ Large marketplace for creatives

Good luck on your freelancing journey! You’ve got this 😃.

KP

Top 15 platforms to land your next freelancing gig was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a freelancer, how many platforms do you use to find new clients?

If you’re like us, you search for opportunities on 4, 5, even 6 platforms each month. This is a huge waste of energy and time, and takes us away from focusing on the real work; using our skills to help our clients.

But, we’ve got to find new work each month. This is the best option we have right now.

Or is it?

Today, we’re here to introduce something new. Something we’ve built for freelancers like us, but also for ourselves.

Meet Freelance Search; today you can search for and get custom recommendations for over 1 million job opportunities from top freelance platforms like Freelancer.com, Upwork, Guru, WorkX, TalentLayer and more — all through ChatGPT.

👉 Click here 👈 to try it today.

Read further to learn how to…

🔎 search for work using Freelance Search on ChatGPT

🚀 get matched with gigs based on your experience

✍️ auto-generate proposals for your favorite opportunities

and more.

Discover freelance opportunities with ChatGPT

Start a chat with Freelance Search

Get started with Freelance Search by 👉 clicking here 👈 or visiting the ChatGPT Store.

Open your first chat window with Freelance Search.

Make your first search

Describe to Freelance Search what types of work you are looking for. He may ask some clarifying questions to make sure he understands your preferences.

You can search for work by…

💃 skill

👶 experience level

🤑 pay level

and anything else you can think of!

Discover opportunities

Freelance Search brings you the jobs that best meet your search criteria; these jobs are pulled from top Freelance marketplaces across the internet.

If you want to see more opportunities, just ask it to “show you some more”.

This is the most simple way to use Freelance Search. Want to super-power your job search? Keep reading.

Upload your resume & find opportunities based on your unique qualifications

Upload information on yourself

To get customized recommendations for jobs, upload information about your work history to Freelance Search.

We recommend uploading items like CVs, LinkedIn profile PDF downloads, Upwork profile PDF downloads, and anything else you feel describes your work background or skills. Freelance Search can accept any PDF file.

Access custom recommendations

Freelance Search will give you custom recommendations for jobs he thinks you are qualified for, based on the information you provided on yourself.

Get help writing proposals for your favorite opportunities

Found a freelance gig you want to apply for? Freelance Search can help.

If Freelance Search already knows who you are (see the previous section for how to upload your resume to Freelance Search) he can write you custom-tailored template proposals that highlight your experience and tie it to the specific requirements of the job you choose.

Get more work today

Freelance Search helps us win more clients than ever, in less time than ever.

It helps us keep our focus on the work that matters, using our skills to help our clients.

👉 Click here 👈 to start using Freelance Search today.

Brought to you by TalentLayer

Freelance Search is brought to you by TalentLayer, an API layer and protocol connecting hiring marketplaces.

Learn more about TalentLayer at www.talentlayer.org

Introducing Freelance Search: Search 1 Million Freelance Opportunities through ChatGPT was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TLDR: TalentLayer GPT app live today. Official announcement coming next week.

The long-awaited ChatGPT Store launched this week Wednesday January 10th. Leading up to it’s launch, the TalentLayer team has been developing a very exciting tool in this new ecosystem. Today, we wanted to share it with you, #buildinpublic style.

Today we’re announcing the V1 of Freelance Search, a ChatGPT plugin that allows workers to search for freelancing opportunities across many freelance marketplaces. Freelance Search was one of the first applications to go live on ChatGPT Store, this Thursday the 11th in the evening.

This was a WILD ride getting this ready to go live. We did it all in <2 weeks on a whim. We’ll be “formally” announcing Freelance Search next week once the V2 is live (with support for a few major freelance marketplaces, totaling over 1 million in searchable jobs).

The #buildinpublic story

On the 5th of this month (only 7 days ago?!?) my CF sent me this message.

So we were like “yea this sounds like a great opportunity. let’s fucking go.”

In late November Pranav hacked a quick GPT app that queried jobs from TalentLayer (literally just for fun). The idea was to take that and make it production ready so people could actually use it.

But, we had an idea that would make it even better — we’re in the process of developing an “Aggregator API” which you saw mentioned in Romain’s message. What this is is it’s an API that pulls together all jobs posted on Freelancer.com, Guru, and Upwork (for now 😉). We were like “Let’s just plug it all together, and then we’ve got the biggest baddest freelance search engine ever to exist”.

7 days later, the V1 of the app is live, creds to Pranav, Brib, Romain, and me.

You can find it in the ChatGPT Store search bar or test it out at the link here.

How it works

Freelance Search lets you search real-time work posts on TalentLayer, directly from ChatGPT’s interface.

Just ask Freelance Search to help you find the type of roles you are looking for.

In the next version (coming next week sometime) you’ll be able to also find jobs from Upwork, Freelancer, Guru — totaling over 1 million jobs available.

If you find an opportunity you like, click through the link provided to apply for the role directly on the freelance marketplace it came from.

PS: Don’t forget to ask Freelance Search to help you write your proposals!

Test it out today

Want to try it out? You can find us by typing “Freelance Search” in the GPT Store search bar, or find us at the link here.

Like I said, we’re OFFICIALLY announcing it next week when V2 is live, but consider this your super secret alpha preview.

LFG.

GPT Store is currently only available for ChatGPT Premium members. In order to use Freelance Search, you must first set up a ChatGPT Premium membership.

Read the open-source code here.

Building in Public Preview: Freelance Search ChatGPT Plugin was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mainnet, memories, growth, and impact

Greetings, friends! Hope you’ve had a relaxing holiday season.

It’s this time of year where many of us start to reflect on the past 12 months. For much of our team, this has been one of the most memorable years of our lives. Today, we’re here to share with you a retrospective on where we’ve been and a preview on where we’re going.

First, we’ll revisit our ✅ goals from the beginning of the year and take a look at achievements.

Next, we’ll highlight some of the 🏅 biggest achievements of our community members this year (with some personal notes of gratitude).

We’ll wrap it up with a photo book of ✈️ our adventures for the year — from our big group house in Lisbon to our final hoorah in Istanbul.

It’s been a wild ride. Thank you to everyone who joined us on this adventure of a year.

Let’s get started.

✅ Revisiting Our Goals

TalentLayer started in summer 2023 with a vision to change how the world works (literally).

In the future, finding work will look different than how it does today; from asking your personal AI agent to find you gigs, to using niche frontends to interact with mainstream platforms. Work marketplaces (including freelance platforms, ride-share apps, gig apps and more) are evolving in the same direction as many other industries; towards open ecosystem models and away from siloization.

TalentLayer is a unified API to connect the world’s service marketplaces; helping current platforms give their users more of what they are searching for and fueling a new breed of platforms in the process.

Read about what TalentLayer means for end users. In 15 years, the world will run on open work infrastructure with user-owned reputation and uncensorable access.

Read about what TalentLayer does to empower platform builders. Today, TalentLayer helps platforms give their users more of what they need by pulling in excess resources from other platforms.

Our long-term vision is having all transactional hiring applications, leveraging TalentLayer as a low-level standard on the backend.

This isn’t something that can be achieved in one year. It’s something that will change the landscape of work for decades to come. But, we had to start somewhere.

For this, we had a plan.

Step 1: Launch the network.

Step 2: Grow an initial network effect — get the first 10,000 users in the protocol and have them start transacting. Our strategy was to have a few crypto-native marketplaces go live on us right after mainnet launch to do this.

Step 3: Incentivize more and more marketplaces to integrate us; gradually growing the network’s size until it shadows the size of even the biggest flagship marketplaces alone.

🥇 Biggest Achievements

We had some big goals for 2023. How did our achievements stack up?

Here are some of the things we’re most proud of doing in our first year building together:

💰 Raised $100K in incubation investment from Kleros Collective, Outlier Ventures, and Protocol Labs

🚀 Launched on mainnet on 4/4/2023

🇪🇺 Approved for a $125K grant and Seal of Excellence status from European Union through grants initiative NGI Search.

🏪 First 3 marketplaces went live on TalentLayer mainnet; WorkX, WorkPod, and BuilderPlace.

💻 TalentLayer SDK and API went live

🏆 Sponsored bounties at 4 hackathons and had 14 people submit towards them

💸 Had over $40,000 in transaction volume in the protocol

😃 Had over 12,000 people register for accounts

In some ways, we feel like we could have done more. We wanted to have more platforms live, more user accounts, more transaction volume, etc. We learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t work this year. We’ll be applying those lessons in 2024 to achieve even more, even faster.

⭐ Contributor Gratitude

TalentLayer isn’t your average team. We’re a movement of many passionate open-source contributors, builders, and founders. We’ve had many contributors join our ranks over the months — some for short time blocks and others for going on 2 years. Our movement is led by our founding team, who guides the vision and core protocol development. Every person mentioned here deserves our gratitude this year. Interested in contributing in 2024? Reach out to us here.

Romain

Romain is our Technical Lead and Co-founder on the Founding Team. He’s a perfectionist, making sure we build things the right way, and a coach, teaching our team and helping them grow with everything they do. He’s built a well oiled engineering machine that keeps running no matter the day. He’s got the ultimate “calm under pressure”: he’s managed to technically lead a team of devs without ever loosing his cool. He also loves Raclette.

Romain, it’s been one of the greatest experiences in my life to build with someone who I trust entirely, who is in sync with me on every thought yet somehow also challenges me (how does this work?), who is one of the most talented developers I know, and who is a true friend. Excited every day to build with you. LFCF. — Kirsten

Kirsten

Kirsten is our Executive Lead and Co-founder on the Founding Team. She passionately leads TalentLayer’s team and strategic vision (as well as our Twitter account).

It’s crazy how much we’ve lived and achieved together this year — it feels like a decade! I’m really proud and grateful to have you as my co-founder. You are the main motor behind our team, always there to ship, learn, grow, and climb trees whenever there is an opportunity. Your dedication and enthusiasm are contagious, making every challenge a shared adventure and every achievement a collective triumph. I see you learning and growing every day while keeping the same force! I can’t wait to continue, LFCF — Romain

Keep throwing gasoline on the TL fire ~*!& ❤, you’ve led the way for the team and you’re doing great ! — Quentin

Quentin

Quentin’s is our Founding Engineer and on the Founding Team. He’s been here engineering our smart contracts from nearly day 1. Quentin always holds us true to our mission, and is a voice for the end users — workers. Quentin has a magical gift to find four leaf clovers, and has shared some with many of our team members. He’s the original raccoon, inventor of the term raccooning.

Quentin, thanks again for everything you do to keep this misison moving forward. Especially, thanks for forcefully calling out a mistake in how we initially designed our fees system, and pushing us to correct it before our mainnet launch. This saved us.

Martin

Martin is a full-stack engineer and Core Team member for most of this year — he’s also been around since the beginning of TalentLayer. Martin has dozens of famous talents — from juggling to guitar — but his biggest superpower is being able to teach himself any skill in record time!

Martin, it’s been a pleasure to live this year with you; we’ve built so much, traveled so many places, and had so many adventures. From your jokes during late nights at hackathons to our piano ballads The TalentLayer Piano Player and whistle competitions, you’ve made this year one to remember. Good luck on growing the FiftyWei collective and excited to cheer on all of your achievements in the next year.

Dercio

Dercio is a data engineer, full-stack developer, and our de facto head of developer relations, repping TalentLayer’s ecosystem everywhere he goes. He’s been a contributor to TalentLayer also from nearly day 1. He’s our ultimate generalist and, famously, our resident DJ.

Brib, Birb, Spanish or Vanish, you bring the vibes with you everywhere you go. From the day we met, I always knew you were going to do great things. I told you that, that day, if you remember. This year, we’re SO PROUD OF YOU! You’ve come so far in achieving your goals one by one and it’s been the greatest to see you spread your wings as a developer, community leader, and the person everyone loves. Hugs, always. See you very soon! — Kirsten

Mattia

Mattia is an full-stack developer, entrepreneur, and one of the most talented devs we know. Mattia built TalentLayer’s dispute resolution system, delegation system, and many of our more complex elements. Mattia joined our Core Team from January to April 2023 to shadow Romain and Kirsten — learning about running startups by being by their side through key decisions and strategic work. Since then, Mattia’s been killing it building indie software products and winning so many hackathons on the side.

Mattia, your work was pivotal to our launch on mainnet — thank you for everything you did to make TalentLayer a reality leading up to our launch. It was a pleasure having you on the team and teaching you all we could. We know you’ll be successful in everything you set your mind on (and you know that too). We’re excited to follow (and hopefully use) the products you ship in the coming years.

Emil

Emil is a Solidity and backend engineer and economic design researcher. Emil was core to engineering key parts of our infra, including our subgraph and search capabilities, but more than that, he was pivotal in forming our understanding of our ecosystem design. He’s a co-author of our white paper.

Emil, your work will always mark TalentLayer as long as it lives; you were behind many of our most important economic design cornerstones that are the foundation of all we’ve built. Thank you for always pushing us to think through the implications of what we build in our early stage, and how it impacts everything we do going forward. We’re so excited for you in your new role and can’t wait to see what you achieve in the coming years.

Pranav

Pranav is a full-stack developer and entrepreneur who’s the dev behind the TalentLayer SDK and API, among other things. Pranav loves his guitars (visible from every video conference) and was a winner of the first-ever ETH India.

Pranav, thank you for finding us on WorkX and for DMing us till we responded!!! We could have never imagined then how core you would become to what do at TalentLayer. Your talent, your experience, and your energy are so appreciated. You’re the reason our API and SDK are live! This is the foundation that the coming year will be built on, and it’s importance can’t be understated. Thank you every day for being here. Looking forward to meeting up IRL finally at one of the hackathons next year.

Gathin

Gathin is a full-stack developer who has been contributing since September of this year. Ever since coming on, he’s been a consistent collaborator! Notably he helped us migrate from Ethers.js to Viem, shipped a lot of features for BuilderPlace, and more! Gathin lives and breaths #buildinpublic and often shares his work on his Linkedin and Twitter.

Thank you for the passion you bring to everything you do and for your willingness to share your story with others. Still crazy that you just found us through investigating our Gitcoin profile a few months ago, and now you’ve contributed so much. It’s a pleasure to have you on the team and looking forward to shipping and growing together in 2024.

Yash

Yash is a full-stack developer and serial hackathon champ. He’s been shipping extended features for TalentLayer including the our Lit Protocol and Request Network integrations.

Yash, thanks for your work, but even more so for always making sure we have healthy warm food to eat at TalentyLayer Houses! Very glad I randomly started talking to you at ETHGlobal Lisbon, and then it turned out that you were “supposed to talk to me” thanks to Christina’s recommendation. Proud of your decision to go full-time building this year. So happy to see you continue winning so many hackathons around the world. Excited to see what your entrepreneurial spirit will create next. — Kirsten

Carl

Carl is a serial entrepreneur, full-stack developer, and jack of all trades. Carl had been building towards a very similar vision as TalentLayer and decided to join forces instead of compete. He stayed with us in TalentLayer House Lisbon and helped us think through many foundational principles on which we’re built.

I remember our long walk we had from one side of Lisbon to the other side of Lisbon — where we talked about all things marketplaces, what you were building with Floo Network and what I was building with TalentLayer. Afterwards, you decided to join forces and bring all the nuances and huge insights that came from your obsessive research of this market. Many of the frames of reference I use on the daily were placed by you. For this, I’m grateful. You are one of the minds I look up to the most for your creativity, confidence, and grit. Excited to see everything you build in the future, after all, you can do Anything.— Kirsten

Owen

Owen is our trusted advisor. He’s been around blockchain since before Ethereum, and is our anchor when it comes to making sure we’re building both useful and revolutionary technology.

Owen, you are our spirit guide. Ever since we met at ETH Prague 2022 we’ve been philosophically in lock step, and you’ve helped us make some of the most important decisions we’ve had this year. So proud of your work on our sister protocol ecosystems Wavelength and Vouch and excited for all you’ll achieve next year.

Tom

Tom is a recent MBA grad who contributed as a grant writer last winter! He scouted for and secured multiple grants for TalentLayer that helped us avoid dilutive fundraising when the market was down.

Tom, your work on the EU grant and others are a big part of the reason we’re still here today! Your contributions made all of what we’ve done to date possible. So glad that Goncalo connected us last winter.

Mitko

Mitko is an entrepreneur and seasoned marketing and product expert who’s been contributing ever since stumbling on a post of ours in the Gitcoin Kernel Slack channel. After teaching himself to code, he’s now contributing on the engineering side as well.

Mitko, thanks for leading product and marketing workshops with our team to help us make sure we’re building products that solve problems. Your mental models have been hugeley helpful. Looking forward to more work on this end (and software development!) next year.

Ahmed

Ahmed is a wunderkind full-stack developer — efficient, opinionated, and always building the sleekest applications. We first met him at ETH Rome where he solo-hacked the 1st prize project for our bounty. The rest is history.

Ahmed, thanks for building some sick products on TalentLayer and for deciding to join our open-source community afterwards. BuilderPlace looks stylish because of you. Looking forward to seeing you again soon at the next TalentLayer House.

Bertrand

Bertrand is a full-stack developer and entrepreneur who’s contributed to TalentLayer during multiple hackathons this year.

Thanks for joining us on our hacking adventures and for stayig with us at TalenetLayer House! You always bring good ideas and good vibes wherever you go. Looking forward to more next year!

Marsian

Marsian, a frontend developer and friend of Yash, joined our crew to contribute towards the SDK’s development to get it ready in time before ETHRome.

Excited to keep collabing next year, and thank you for everything you’ve done.

Stefano

Stefano is a graphic designer and web developer who made the new (professional version) of the TalentLayer Raccoon!

Stefano, the importance of this raccoon can not be understated. Thank you.

Udhaykumar

Udhaykumar, a full-stack developer, is one of our newer OS contributors!

Thanks for your work on improving our XMTP integration and looking forward to really getting started next year!

Scott

Scott is an advisor to TalentLayer and a cofounder of Gitcoin. Scott always brings great ideas to the team, from ways to approach new partnerships to fundraising strategy.

Scott, thanks always for your support in our efforts! Looking forward to tackling new challenges together next year.

❤️ Friends Forever

We also wanted to give a shout-out to our friends who’ve been by our side from the beginning.

The WorkX Team

WorkX was the first platform to go live on TalentLayer, and we’ve never met a team more aligned with us on mission and vision.

Rik, Daniel and team, It’s been a pleasure to hang, hack, and travel the world with you this year. We remember the day we met in complete serendipity at a cafe during ETH Lisbon 2022 — when Daniel came over to ask us what we were working on, because it sounded a LOT like what he was working on. Cheers to many more adventures, and changing the way the world works together.

Memester

Memester, what can we say, you’ve been one of our biggest cheer leaders ever since you attended our workshop at FIL Lisbon 2022. You were the first ever person to post a job on TalentLayer, you always shill us to possible partners, and you even HACK on our bounties at hackathons. Thanks for inviting us to your birthday party and letting us live at your grandpa’s house for a week ❤️ You are seriously the best.

✈️ Our IRL Adventures

While the TalentLayer team is fully remote, we’re always making excuses to hang out in person. Luckily, with so many hackathons around the world, it’s not hard to do. We’ve seen each other in over 10 countries this year, which is wild to think about.

It all started in Lisbon…

TalentLayer House Lisbon

We started off the year living in a 13 bed group house in Lisbon as part of the Kleros Incubator! We had the original TalentLayer House for three months, and it was such an amazing time full of memories. Some of us lived their full-time, and others popped in and out. The house was always buzzing with people coming and going and sharing innovative ideas. We also took plenty of time for surfing, boxing, rock climbing, and cooking so many “mystery box” dinners together.

The Kleros Incubator

For the first 3 months of the year we were in the Kleros Incubator working out of The Block coworking in Lisbon. It’s where we built our MVP and launched TalentLayer on Mainnet! So many memories at The Block — from making tortillas for lunch on the patio to all clicking the “go live on mainnet” button together.

ETH Denver

We started out at the Gitcoin Retreat in Boulder for some cold ice baths, then headed to Denver! ETH Denver was one of the wildest hackathons and conferences of the year. It’s where we had our first big raccooning session (courtesy of Quentin stuffing his backpack with soooo much goodies). It’s where we danced with bananas. Thanks again to Developer DAO and Fluence who gave our team a scholarship to attend ETH Denver.

We attended as hackers and shipped BettRPC, a tool that increases reliability of RPC calls using Fluence.

We also won the ETH Denver pitch competition this year!

ETH Porto

Porto was so beautiful, and one of our fave hackathons of the year. It was a smaller crowd with big ideas and a lot of cool projects.

We attended as hackers and shipped ZKPOW, a tool to let you prove your work reputation without revealing personal data, built on TalentLayer. We had the pleasure to hack on it with Daniel from the WorkX team!

We also had time for shenanigans. We raccooned 10 boxes of pizza and ate them for days after. We also found a ton of 4 leaf clovers for the whole team thanks to Quentin!

Algarve Team Trip

To celebrate our mainnet launch, we took a trip with the team to the Algarve! We were just in time to celebrate Memester’s birthday party (and give him a homemade gift). We had fun surfing together one last time.

Visiting Owen, and Mitko in London

Kirsten traveled to London to visit our contributors and some partners! Also stopped by the Outlier Ventures meetup.

Consensus

Romain and Kirsten won tickets to Concensus as a prize for winning the ETH Denver Pitch Competiton. That was another awesome week of meeting new friends and experiencing Texas culture. We raccooned some awesome fidget toys and lots of socks. We also casually convinced some firefighters to let us in their truck — after all, it’s not every day a French gets to experience a US firetruck like in the movies!

ETH Global Lisbon

ETH Global Lisbon was a blast — we built InfluLenser, an influencer marketing marketplace on Lens and TalentLayer.

ETH Dam

We flew to Amsterdam to visit the WorkX team and boy was that a memorable event. Not one, but two of our TalentLayer x WorkX teams won prizes as hackers. Romain and Rick’s team ended up winning the Defi Track prize for ZKPay, a private payrolll app built on TalentLayer, and Kirsten’s team ended up winning the quadratic voting prize for Zikileaks, a decentralized wikileaks.

We also played volleyball with a half filled waterbottle, cooked a Mystery Box breakfast with WorkX, went on a future of work friend’s boat, and biked around the city a ton!

SpagettETH

Kirsten and Owen visited SpagettETH where Kirsten gave a lecture on TalentLayer and the future of open graph networks.

ETH Prague

At ETH Prague we attended as hackers and built BeeTogether — a freelance collective management platform built on TalentLayer.

Kirsten and Romain also gave a workshop on how to built privacy-centric hiring tech using TalentLayer!

TalentLayer Mom voluneered at the event! She became an iconic figure amongst the attendees.

We also did some rad mystery box cooking competitions, this time with Daniel from WorkPod as the chef.

ETH Barcelona

We attended ETH Barcelona as speakers and discussed the future of work on a panel discussion. Was great to connect with new partners and discuss TalentLayer!

ETH CC & ETH Paris

ETH CC was a blast! We attended ETH Paris as co-sponsors alongside XMTP. The top prize winner for our bounty was Freelenser, a freelancing platform for the Lens ecosystem, that was 100% embedded into a messaging-only interface. Some of the TalentLayer team also attended as hackers and built Trustky — a reputation aggregation tool for freelancers.

ETH Warsaw

ETH Warsaw was one of the most beautiful hackathons of the year, and TalentLayer House Warsaw was probably one of the coolest TL Houses to date (especially the rooftop)!

Our team attended as hackers and built ProofofPicture, a protography marketplace with anti-AI image verification tech, on TalentLayer.

Another incredible mystery box competition, this time with Yash as the chef, and Brib as the literal DJ with his full setup.

ETH Rome

ETHRome was our #1 favorite event this year.

We attended as sponsors, and got an awesome booth and banner set up thanks to Limone.eth! Pranav just finished the TalentLayer SDK and it was the first-ever time we would see it live in action.

We recorded a very funny Introduction to ETH Rome video for Quentin, who missed his flight at the last minute.

We brought a family of raccoons (gender neutral parent raccoon, and 4 children) who explored the hackathon. Unfortunately… a few went missing and we went on a mystery solving hunt. Their disappearance remains a mystery.

We had 6 teams submit towards our bounty, with 3 winners.

ZKPoo — A vote delegation marketplace.

BountyArena — A bounty platform for blockchain ecosystems to use for bug bounties, grants, and more.

GreatGrants — A grant platform for DAO members to vote on and allocate grant funding to recipients.

At the afterparty, Brib did a DJ set with Limone! Everyone loved it.

After the hackathon, the Emperor of ETH Rome came to TalentLayer house to cook us and frens his family recipe of Carbonara!!!

ETH Lisbon

We attended as co-sponsors alongside iExec, the main sponsor of ETH Lisbon. We had a joint booth and a joint bounty to build projects using both iExec and TalentLayer.

We had 2 teams win prizes for our bounty out of the 7 that submitted!

RaccBook — a decentralized lending application that uses TalentLayer ID work reputation to offer people undercollateralized loans.

TallyRally — a gamified marketplace for paid adversing.

We also had a lot of fun and shenanigans at TalentLayer House Lisbon… including getting locked out and trying to pick the lock to get back in 😜

Devconnect

We went to ETH Istanbul and Devconnect thanks to a travel grant from the iExec team! There we attended as hackers and built Geanie AI, a marketplace for AI agents built on TalentLayer, using iExec for private data access.

iExec Incubator

We visited Lyon for the iExec Incubator launch party and pitch event! We recorded a lot of interviews, attended some workshiops, and explored the city. We also tried HOT boba tea for the first time (it was good, I swear).

All in all, we visited 16+ events across 10+ counties this year, growing our team and our movement in the process. Grateful for all of the friends we’ve met and excited for more to come next year.

🥂 Cheers to Next Year!

We’re so excited to share some big announcements with you to ring in the new year!

It’s 2024. A year of the 4! Undoubtedly, a good year for team TalentLayer.

It’s been a pleasure growing, learning, and building with you all! Thanks to everyone who’s followed our journey and who read this till the end. Love you all and looking forward to the future.

Cheers!

The TalentLayer Community (🍀,🦝)

TalentLayer: 2023 in Review was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A BuilderPlace Case Study

The emergency

It was 8:34 AM CET on Friday, December 1st when I got a message from Agu, my friend and COO of TheBadge — a decentralized certification protocol.

They were 3 days away from launching “blockchain certifications as a service” to mainnet when they came across a 🪲 bug that was preventing their subgraph from deploying on Polygon.

🤯 This was a big issue. One of their clients needed their certifications as a service to issue credentials on Monday, December 4th!

They reached out to The Graph team for help. Their developers diligently checked the issue, but didn’t have immediate solutions. The Graph team created an ticket on Github, to ask the community for help.

TheBadge’s team had been working all night to figure out the issue, but couldn’t solve it. So, they asked our help to launch an 🚨 emergency bug bounty 🚨 on BuilderPlace — an open-source bounty management platform that just launched on TalentLayer.

The bounty

TheBadge team is participating in BuilderPlace Alpha cohort. This bug turned out to be the most important first bounty to post on their community portal thebadge.builder.place.

By 11:00 AM CET, the bounty post went live on BuilderPlace.

The bounty post automatically got distributed to other hiring platforms like WorkX; that’s because BuilderPlace is integrated with TalentLayer; an API that connects marketplaces.

We posted the bounty in a bunch of smart contract auditor Telegram groups and Discords — and, of course, Twitter!

Kirsten 🛠️ TalentLayer (🍀,🦝) on Twitter: "Hey! My friends at @thebadgexyz, an attestation protocol, are having an open-source emergency! They are trying to deploy their graph to polygon this weekend, but have run into a mystery bug. $500 bounty on @builderplace if someone can solve this before their launch on Monday! / Twitter"

Hey! My friends at @thebadgexyz, an attestation protocol, are having an open-source emergency! They are trying to deploy their graph to polygon this weekend, but have run into a mystery bug. $500 bounty on @builderplace if someone can solve this before their launch on Monday!

These channels resulted in 8 open-source auditors joining TheBadge’s Discord in the following few hours. @Codingsh was one of them! He found the emergency bug via Kirsten’s Twitter post.

TheBadge’s team explained the issue in detail on their Discord #bounty-hunters channel and in this Notion guide.

People started to review the code and come up with possible explanations for the issue. 🤔

Different ideas were discussed and tested, but none solved the issue.

By the end of the day Sunday, there was still no resolution to be found. TheBadge team was figuring out backup plans.

The solution

On Monday, December 4th — the day the mainnet launch was schedule for, and the day that TheBadge’s first client needed to use their certifications — a message came into the Discord at 5:09 AM CET.

@Codingsh proposed a solution. Agu ended up checking it, and it indeed resolved the deployment issue!

TheBadge was able to deploy their subgraph on Polygon — just in time.

What was the issue?

It turned out in the end that there was not an issue with TheBadge’s code itself — after all, they were able to deploy their contracts and subgraphs successfully to multiple other chains, just couldn’t deploy to Polygon.

The version of TheGraph CLI that TheBadge was using to deploy had a bug relating to the RPC provider it used on Polygon. Updating the CLI solved the problem.

Sometimes the most simple bugs cause the most issues — oftentimes they’re hard to diagnose; especially when hidden behind multiple layers of dependencies like this one.

In this thread, Codingsh gave an overview of how he approached the issue.

TheBadge’s team reported back to The Graph team that they’d solved the issue! The case of the mystery failed subgraph deployment was solved.

Thanks to @Codingsh TheBadge was able to launch on mainnet on-time.

TheBadge’s team was incredible grateful for his help, and awarded him the bounty of 500 USDC through BuilderPlace.

The power of open-source

By simply sharing the things we need help with in public, and sharing the mission behind what you are doing, we can achieve so much more than we could alone.

Whether we’re talking about solving pressing emergency bugs or even just building new features for your ecosystem — there are people our there that want to help you today.

The reason I’m so excited about the launch of BuilderPlace is because it gives every team the power to engage open-source contributors towards their project’s goals.

I’ve seen it first-hand at TalentLayer — we wouldn’t be where we are today without contributions of 25+ open-source developers, marketers, and researchers.

We were so happy to see TheBadge have so much success with their first ever open-source contribution! They’ve already posted two more since then.

Are you an open-source developer looking to have an impact?

Are you an open-source project looking to expand?

Check out BuilderPlace today. It may be just the tool you’ve been looking for.

Learn more

TheBadge

TheBadge is a decentralized certification platform powered by blockchain. It provides users the opportunity to tokenize information from the real world in the form of certifications (badges). These badges are verified and validated by the community, which decides what should be accepted and what not.

Twitter | Website | Discord | TheBadge.Builder.Place

BuilderPlace

BuilderPlace is an open-source community management platform and contributor discovery engine. It let’s teams create, customize, and manage their own open-source bounty board.

Twitter | Website | Build.Builder.Place

TalentLayer

TalentLayer is the API connecting the world’s marketplaces. TalentLayer helps marketplace applications like freelance marketplaces and ride-share apps access additional supply or demand when they need it by tapping into a wider network of users. TalentLayer’s Web 3 API and SDK is live and available for integration.

Twitter | Website | Documentation | TalentLayer.Builder.Place

How One Open-Source Contributor Saved TheBadge’s Launch Day was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m writing this on October 25th, 2023. Today I realized that maintaining a personal website these days has become a bit of a hassle — so I copied over the main content to this Medium post! For now, I’ll use this post as an occasionally updated personal website. Welcome to my small piece of the internet.

A brief intro

I spend most of my time building tools for work sovereignty at TalentLayer and the rest of my time traveling to hackathons.

Ask me about Cryptoanarchy.

I write shitty code, but I build great teams.

I’ve built a few companies. I help a few projects with governance, partnerships, and process design. If you want to collab, DM me on Twitter to chat.

I’ve been featured as a lecturer on blockchain governance and ecosystem design by INATBA (European Commission blockchain association), The IEEE, Fedex Institute of Technology, Hyperledger Foundation, various Ethereum community conferences, and others.

Magyar vagyok. Ha magyar vagy, legyünk barátok!!! Soy puertorriqueña, pero mi español es muy malo. Probablemente pediré hablar inglés. Mein Deutsch ist jetzt schlecht (habe ich in den letzten Jahren nicht gesprochen), aber ich liebe die Sprache und werde sie bald verbessern.

Favorite quotes and other thoughts

“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.” — Kofi Annan

“The thought of being a creature of the present and the past, troubled me, and I longed to have a future — a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul — whose life and happiness is unceasing progress — what the prison is to the body.” — Frederick Douglass

“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.” ― Friedrich Hayek

My most fundamental belief is that humans are autonomous; that is, they are able to take action to impact their environment and circumstances. Anything can be done by anyone with enough willpower and grit. We make our own reality.

The future is decentralized and will be characterized by mass crypto adoption, flat organizations, and voluntary governance.

Those who can self-teach will inherit the earth.

Building tools for sovreighty

Over the coming decades, blockchain technology is poised to enable an entirely new sort of freedom for people globally.

Freedom /ˈfriːdəm/

a. The quality or state of being free: such as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action

b. Sovereignty; Work Sovereignty, Financial Sovereignty, Geographic Sovereignty

To obtain freedom, we need to have sovereignty; ultimate and un-confiscatable authority over ourselves. The ability to make decisions for ourselves, free of coercion.

Sovereignty can be broken down into three pillars: financial sovereignty, work sovereignty, and geographic sovereignty.

Financial sovereignty is having control over your own savings and investments, free of centralized intermediaries. Cryptocurrency and decentralized finance are the tools that have allowed for the realization of financial sovereignty.

Without sovereignty of finances, centralized intermediaries such as banks, nation-states, and corporations can confiscate wealth for any reason.

Work sovereignty is having control over how you make income to the extent that your earning ability is resilient amidst outside forces. This is made possible when one’s reputation, built over time, is trusted by enough people to make finding new work easy. Unfortunately, reputation is hard to scale; it’s only been possible to scale reputation beyond Dunbar’s Number through “trusted” (centralized) intermediaries.

Without sovereignty of work, the ability to acquire new work whenever you please, nation-states, employers, and job platforms can coerce you by rescinding work permits, firing or threatening to fire you, or banning you from job platforms. I am currently working on this problem area, applying blockchain technology to create less siloed and more accessible labor markets: TalentLayer.

Geographic sovereignty is having the ability to easily change your physical location. Moving jurisdictions allows you to evade war, censorship, and coercion and go where you are treated best.

Geographic sovereignty is enabled by work sovereignty and financial sovereignty. Having sufficient savings and ease of making more income lowers the switching costs associated with moving jurisdictions. In the direst situations, people will free their geographic area with nothing in order to stay alive — but the lower the switching cost between jurisdictions the less coercion and negative situations people will put up with.

With the ability to assuredly generate income (work sovereignty), store wealth (financial sovereignty), and physically move to optimal places (geographic sovereignty), true freedom can be recognized. Coercion and manipulation of people with all three becomes extremely difficult.

This is what we’re shooting for. This is the future we are building.

My prior lives

Co-Founded NFT Marketplace SDK (“21 — “22) Age 24–25

Co-founded and now advising FACINGS, a venture-backed NFT marketplace toolkit. Built our international team, forged our go-to-market partnerships, and worked closley with white-glove partners.

Enterprise Blockchain Stuff + Governance Research (“19 — “21) Age 22–24

Stumbled into a blockchain governance workshop which led to co-founding a consultancy with a former exec of a major L1. Consulted enterprise DLT projects on governance and coalition design (weaning suits onto blockchain via private permissioned consortium networks). Co-led the IEEE’s Blockchain Governance Research Working Group, growing it to 200 members across 6 continents over two years. Was a part of Gitcoin KERNEL Block 3.

More Startups (“18 — “19) Age 21–22

Co-founded a few software startups including a data aggregation tech platform and an influencer marketing marketplace.

PHP Winter (Winter “18) Age 21

Taught myself PHP and built basic webapps on freelance contracts. Eventually realized I like building companies more than building code myself.

Public Policy Coalition Building (“15 — “19) Age 18–22

Interned on a senate campaign before being promoted to a team coordination role. Managed grassroots coalition building and community education for a few public policy organizations working on reducing government cronyism. Realized that it’s hard to change the momentum of government, corruption is rampant, and I can make a bigger impact building around the system via innovating technology. Was a participant in Atlas Network’s Leader Lab.

Dropped Out (Winter “16) Age 19

Studied towards a computational linguistics degree for about 8 months. Dropped out when I landed a full-time job in public policy.

Early Startups + Public Forums (“14 — “15) Age 17–18

Co-founded an online public speaking courseware startup. Helped coordinate and moderate public forums on international current events, business, and tech issues at the City Club of Cleveland.

Archeology Intern (“13) Age 16

Classified bone fragments from dig sites and illustrated biological specimens (1, 2, 3) for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Archeology and Paleontology Department. Realized I didn’t want to be an archeologist.

Need some help?

I’m happy to help folks trying to get into Web 3 get connected with the right orgs. If that’s you, DM me on Twitter.

Other links

Public speaking archive

My writings (most of them, at least)

My mixtape (updated weekly)

Linktree

TLDR: iExec and TalentLayer sponsor a bounty at ETHLisbon 2023

GM, friends. Haven’t made your hackathon plans for November? Join us and the iExec team for hacking, shenanigans, and plenty of pastéis de nata — all in the heart of beautiful Lisbon!

iExec and TalentLayer are sponsoring a bounty at ETHLisbon challenging hackers to use our tools in interesting ways. Stay tuned for more deets!

iExec is an open-source, decentralized cloud computing platform. We’re thrilled to partner with during ETHLisbon.

Team TalentLayer: Back in Lisbon

We’re excited to be back in Lisbon! Many of you know that our team spent three months together in Lisbon during the Kleros Incubator this year. While we were in Lisbon, we built the mainnet versions of our smart contracts. Lisbon was also the place where we *infamously* launched to mainnet by all clicking the deployment button at once on 4/4/2023! It’s easy to say, Lisbon holds a special place in our hearts.

Join us at ETH Lisbon

Last year our team attended ETHLisbon as hackers — this year, we’re attending as bounty sponsors! It’s been a while ride. What we can tell you is ETHLisbon was one of the most fun hackathons last year. This year should be nothing less!

Dates: November 3–5

Apply to Hack: https://ethlisbon.org/

What: Lisbon’s OG ETH hackathon

About the bounty

Bounties will be announced closer to the day of the event by the ETHLisbon team! Don’t worry, there’s still a lot of exploration you can do in the meantime.

There’ are a few key technologies that we recommend studying up on to be prepared to go for the iExec x TalentLayer Bounty!

Learn about iExec DataProtector

DataProtector is a data permissioning stack that enables you to build solutions that hide or show data based on parameters you configure. It’s designed to help you empower users with more control over their data. It uses iExec’s compute marketplace.

Learn about iExec Web3Mail

Web3Mail is an anonymous email layer built with DataProtector. It allows traditional emails to be sent with the sender only knowing the wallet address of the user.

Learn about TalentLayer Stack

TalentLayer is an on-chain open graph infrastructure that powers service marketplace applications; where many applications can leverage one shared data and transaction layer. It can be used to build platforms ranging from decentralized ride-sharing to freelance marketplaces.

Learn about TalentLayer StarterKit

TalentLayer StarterKit is a boilerplate marketplace application natively integrated with TalentLayer. It serves as a great starting point for any TalentLayer-based marketplace application.

See you in Lisbon!

Want to learn more about us in the meantime? Check out our websites below.

Learn more about iExec

Learn more about TalentLayer

iExec and TalentLayer Partner at ETHLisbon! was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Letter from the Core Team

Greetings, friends!

Welcome to our monthly community update. This has been a really exciting month for us, where we onboarded 3 new contributors, had an awesome time at ETH Warsaw, and started work on a super important build: TL SDK! Thanks to everyone who’s following our journey — couldn’t do it without you.

❤️ TalentLayer Core Team

⭐️ EVENTS ⭐️

🇵🇱 ETH Warsaw:3 Winning Hackathon Projects

At ETH Warsaw we had 3 prize-winning teams from our community of builders 👏 👏 👏

@mattiapomelli + @limone_eth : Split3💸 web3 splitwise 🏆

@yash_goyal_dev + @kirstenrpomales: Proof of Picture📸 authenticated photo marketplace on TalentLayer 🏆

@spanish_vanish+ @NevvDevv : Aleph Blog🐵 web3 blog 🏆

TalentLayer.lens (🍀,🦝) ✈️ ETHRome on Twitter: "So proud of our 3 prize-winning teams from @TalentLayer House @ETHWarsaw!@mattiapomelli + @limone_eth: Split3💸 web3 splitwise 🏆@yash_goyal_dev + @kirstenrpomales: Proof of Picture📸 authenticated photo marketplace 🏆@spanish_vanish + @NevvDevv: Aleph Blog🐵 web3 blog 🏆 pic.twitter.com/0VC0vXBZId / Twitter"

So proud of our 3 prize-winning teams from @TalentLayer House @ETHWarsaw!@mattiapomelli + @limone_eth: Split3💸 web3 splitwise 🏆@yash_goyal_dev + @kirstenrpomales: Proof of Picture📸 authenticated photo marketplace 🏆@spanish_vanish + @NevvDevv: Aleph Blog🐵 web3 blog 🏆 pic.twitter.com/0VC0vXBZId

🇵🇱 TalentLayer House Warsaw

We had an awesome time together during ETHWarsaw at the latest TalentLayer House! Was great to have the Urbe community climb on the roof with us, and make a mystery box cooking competition with TL team members Spanish or Vanish, Yash, Mattia, Kirsten, and Daniel from WorkPod auditor marketplace!

TalentLayer.lens (🍀,🦝) ✈️ ETHRome on Twitter: ""MysteryBox Competition (noun)A cooking competition hosted at various TalentLayer houses that involves participants gathering random ingredients and presenting them in a box to a selected chef. The chef then has to prepare the ingredients. (cont...)" pic.twitter.com/cySJ73rpGD / Twitter"

"MysteryBox Competition (noun)A cooking competition hosted at various TalentLayer houses that involves participants gathering random ingredients and presenting them in a box to a selected chef. The chef then has to prepare the ingredients. (cont...)" pic.twitter.com/cySJ73rpGD

🇮🇹 TalentLayer Sponsoring ETH Rome!

Have you heard? TalentLayer is sponsoring ETHRome! ETHRome is happening first week of October and we’ll have a HUGE TalentLayer contingent attending.

It will be TalentLayer’s first independent sponsorship of a hackathon which is HUGE for us!!! So excited to announce the bounties soon.

Let’s go!!!

⛵️ SHIPPING ⛵️

TalentLayer SDK Kick-started

We started work on the new TalentLayer SDK and frontend library! So stoked to share this with you guys — if you think TL is easy to integrate now, wait till you see this. Lots of architecture inspiration from our frens Lens Protocol bts.

Shoutout to Pranav for specing the SDK and getting things ready to roll.

New TalentLayer Dune Dashboard

BOOM we got a new Dune Dashboard. Now you can follow all the transactions, user creations, and other activity you please at this link.

TalentLayer Dune Dashboard

Shoutout to Brib for the great work on the analytics dash! LFG! 🚀

Progress in iExec Integration

Making progress on the iExec integration! Getting excited to share more on this during ETH Lisbon where we’re preparing a joint bounty with iExec x TalentLayer 👀 (you heard it here first)!

Shoutout to Quentin and Romain for keeping this rolling this month.

Roadmap to Bootstrapping Network Effects

This week the Core Team published a guide for our opensource community about how we’re planning to bootstrap network effects together. Some really great stuff in there — highly recommend to give it a read.

Bootstrapping TalentLayer Together: How Do We Do it?

🦝 TEAM UPDATES 🦝

TalentLayer Mom

Our mom got a twitter account! Go follow her here.

TalentLayer.lens (🍀,🦝) ✈️ ETHRome on Twitter: "our mom is joining twitter soon, we'll let u know when u should follow her #talentlayermom pic.twitter.com/lCn0vqeFhv / Twitter"

our mom is joining twitter soon, we'll let u know when u should follow her #talentlayermom pic.twitter.com/lCn0vqeFhv

New Contributors!

We’ve been super fortunate to have three new contirbutors join us this month! Pranav is a frontend engineer based in India. Sohey is a UX/UI designer based in The Netherlands. Spandan is a frontend engineer based in India (and bff of Yash on our team)! Let’s goooo!!!

🛠️ START BUILDING TODAY 🛠️

TalentLayer’s developer tools are here today to empower your team to ship your marketplace fast.

Get started by visiting our developer docs.

Start Building »

TalentLayer Community Update: August 2023: TalentLayer House Warsaw, Road to ETH Rome, SDK Incoming! was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A memo for TalentLayer’s open-source community

GM, TalentLayer open-source community 🍀

We wanted to share with you more on our biggest goal that we are working on: bootstrapping TalentLayer. We’re a sorta big team now — lots of new and old contributors — and we’re working on a lot of things at once. That’s awesome, but also means sometimes it can be hard to see the big picture and how all our work fits together as puzzle pieces.

How do we make sure we’re all on the same page? To start, we made this guide! 😄

This is intended to be a spark for discussion. I’ve made this doc open for comments (or at least I tried to — lmk if you can comment haha). Please feel free to mark it up with ideas or questions.

Thank you for being a part of our community. We’re proud to build alongside you, and excited to reach our next stage of growth, together!

❤️ TalentLayer Core Team

The Goal: Bootstrap TalentLayer

Our goal at TalentLayer is to become the underlying infrastructure for all the service platforms of the world. In doing so, we’ll enable all workers to own their reputation and access a pool of jobs with complete sovereignty.

That’s a big vision — easy to say, hard to do. How do we get there?

We need to bootstrap the network! There can’t be any value created through connecting workers and work if there aren’t enough work or workers at the protocol level.

TalentLayer is a “market network” — that means a network of marketplaces/interfaces, with an underlying unified layer for reputation and transactions.

platforms can be anything from self-hosted interfaces to major software marketpalce businesses

The larger our pool of hirers and workers — our “network effect” — grows, the larger the marketplace that will be interested in tapping into that network. Read more about network effects.

It’s valuable for a platform to integrate if the network effect of TalentLayer is of substantial size to help fill positions that remain unfilled or place workers that remain unplaced on their platform. For brand new platforms, it’s immediately valuable to integrate. For major existing platforms, it’s valuable to integrate only if the network effect of TalentLayer is of meaningful size.

Now that you know a bit about the high-level stuff, how do you even go about scaling such a network? Next let’s look at the three key demographics needed in our ecosystem to scale TalentLayer.

TalentLayer as a Three-Sided Market Network

Since TalentLayer is a market network, despite us serving two-sided hiring platforms, we ourselves are actually a three-sided market. Want to learn more about market networks? Read this.

The three demographics in our market network are 👷 Workers, 🎩 Hirers, and ⚒️ Builders.

The most important value exchange in the market network happens between workers and hirers. Builders build tools that facilitate value exchange between workers and hirers.

🍀 Note on Recruiters: Technically, there is a fourth demographic in the ecosystem — recruiters. They are not themselves workers, hirers, or builders, but they help in facilitating connections between the three other demographics. This we’ll explore in another memo (stay tuned for after we release our referrals system late 2023).

Let’s learn about each demographic.

👷 Workers

Who they are: Salary workers, gig workers, part-time workers

What they do: They do work for someone else in exchange for money

Examples:

• A student makes money delivering pizza
• A business man earns a salary working for a tech company
• A freelance developer works for clients
• An Uber driver earns by driving people around

🎩 Hirers

Who they are: HR managers, business owners, everyday consumers

What they do: They pay someone money to do something for them

Examples:

• A mom in Warsaw buys grocery delivery services on Glovo food delivery app
• A HR manager in the UK hires a software developer
• A branding agency hires an influencer for influencer marketing
• A college student hires a tutor
• A businessman orders an Uber ride

🛠️ Builders

Who they are: Entrepreneurs and the developers that work with them

What they do: They build tools that facilitate hirer and worker relationships.

Examples:

• Developer working for a mainstream web 2 marketplace
• Entrepreneur building crypto bounties platform
• Entrepreneur building cross-border payroll solution
• Developer building web 3 freelance marketplace

Entry Market

TalentLayer as it stands today can be used for literally any two-sided service relationship.

• gig marketplaces
• ride sharing apps
• house sharing apps
• photography marketplaces
• telemedicine apps
• ai task marketplaces
• payroll platforms
• etc.

This means the sky is the limit — but if we want to bootstrap network effects, we need to be strategic and choose the right entry market. Why?

Because TalentLayer’s main value is providing liquidity sharing amongst marketplaces, in order to succeed in this we need to have marketplaces with similar target demographics in the network.

Criteria for a Good Entry Market

We could target any two-sided service relationship as an entry market, but for now it makes sense to choose something that meets the following criteria:

🌐 Location Independent:

By choosing an industry that isn’t tied to geo-location, we make the network easier to grow.

🚗 Uber = Location dependent: If you have 100 drivers and 100 riders sign up but they are all in different cities around the world, you can’t provide any value.

💻 Developer marketplace = Location independent: If you have 100 devs and 100 dev hirers sign up but they are all in different cities around the world, you CAN match and get people hired.

💵 High Margin:

By having a high-margin focus industry, platform builders are able to make more profits (drawing in more builders)

💻 Tech Savvy:

We want the hirers and workers to optimally be tech savvy — our product isn’t mature yet and has a tech barrier to entry.

📈 Crypto Savvy:

Account abstraction tech (in general in the crypto industry) isn’t mature enough to allow full web2 user experience yet. For this reason, we need to have users be at lease a little bit crypto savvy. In the meantime, we’ll build account abstraction tech to the extend the industry allows. We think web2 UX is coming in 6 mos to 1 year based on current industry trends. Then we will be able to start mass onboarding average users.

Our Entry Market: Developers

With all this said, what’s the best entry market?

Software developers who have some experience or interest in web 3.

Luckily, we all are software developers, have used software dev hiring platforms, and know the feeling and issues with getting AND hiring for dev jobs. What a pleasure to serve ourselves as an entry market, haha!

Most of the platforms building on TalentLayer today are developer or tech industry focused.

😜 Behind the scenes: Did we always intentionally target developers as an entry market? Nope! In fact, this sort of happened on it’s own because without our prompting many of the first marketplaces building on TalentLayer just happened to be developer focused. This is because in general developer marketplaces are very popular businesses compared to other marketplaces because developers are in very high demand.

So, if we’re targeting developers as our entry market, that means our three demographics are actually a subset — people serving or who are devs!

👷 Workers

Workers who are software developers

🎩 Hirers

Hirers who look for software developers

🛠️ Builders

Builders of dev platforms and matching services

TalentLayer Community’s Role in Bootstrapping The Network:

Ok that was a lot of high-level stuff. How are we going to do the stuff? We have strategies to target each of the key demographics we have. Be fore that, though, a word on TalentLayer’s role…

The TalentLayer protocol developers (core team, open-source team, founders) in general DON’T want to host platforms. It’s not our job — we develop and maintain the protocol, and we aren’t in the business of running hiring platforms and/or competing with the platforms building on top of us.

If we don’t want to host platforms, how do we bootstrap the network? If we don’t build any interfaces, then we can’t funnel in workers and hirers directly into the protocol — this in turn makes the network effect entirely reliant on third party platforms integrating. This causes a chicken and egg problem, because without the network effect already there, only brand new platforms will have an interest in integrating (and brand new platforms don’t have many users themselves)! We’ve realized this over the past 5 months since mainnet launch.

We need to be pragmatic about how to bootstrap the network, even if it’s our goal to avoid hosting platforms. For this reason, we’re committing to building interfaces that we intend to host for as short a period as we can — we don’t aim to run them as businesses and will either sunset them after a period or hand them off to another team to run. Rather, our intent is to have them get enough usage to get enough workers/hirers on the network to bring bigger platform builders on the network. In other words, until we reach “medium network effect” as described in the graphic in section one.

🎩 Hirers — Embeddable Hiring Board

Codename: BuilderWorld or MyGigBoard

Demand: We’ve been asked repeatedly for someone to build a “Pallet on TalentLayer” — where teams can host their own job boards on their own website, but still get posts circulated to a wider hiring network. Teams don’t like Pallet because it doesn’t have internal payments, only offers full-time work coverage, and sells all data of users.

Solution: An embeddable i-frame hiring board for companies, connected with TalentLayer to distribute opportunities across other platforms — giving opportunities more views.

Status: We have UX/UI in progress on this (Sohey) and will start implementation soon (Pranav). We have market research happening as well (Mitko) with the teams interested in the offering.

👷 Workers — Worker Reputation Platform

Codename: Trustky

Problem: We have 12K crypto-native workers in the network already, but there’s very little data out there about them. Therefore, hirers can’t know if they pose a good talent pool. We also need more talent to enter the network.

Solution: Incentivize workers to create holistic profiles by associating third-party accounts, filling out more sections, etc.

Status: We built Trustky, a resume builder and web 3 worker-focused marketplace, at ETH Paris this year. We’re doing some UX/UI work (Romain, Kirsten) to refactor it into such a worker reputation platform, and expand features (Yash). Then, we’ll roll-out incentives to get a TLID and add more profile deets!

🛠 Builders — TalentLayer SDK and Frontend Library

Codename: TalentLayer SDK

Problem: Right now the main way teams are integrating TalentLayer is by taking the example codebase, reading through it, and figuring how to implement — or by forking the example codebase. This is inefficient and not suitable for scalable adoption.

Solution: A nice clean SDK and frontend library to enable fast and flexible integration.

Status: The architecture just got approved and development has started. V1.1 delivery estimated for ETH Rome (Pranav).

That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading, friends. Looking forward to your comments.

Let’s roll.

Bootstrapping TalentLayer Together: How Do We Do it? was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Maintain Privacy While Reaching Your Users

At TalentLayer, we’re creating a better way of working. To achieve this, we’ve re-thought the tech stack for work from the ground up. TalentLayer is a low-level open data ecosystem and transaction layer where users own their reputations, anyone can work with anyone, and builders can grow profitable businesses helping parties connect. In the long-run, this network will be a unifying layer that exists below all hiring applications.

Our tech needs to be exceptionally accessible to builders and end users in order to achieve our vision. This is easier said than done.

We’re using blockchain technology to enable peer to peer network effects without an intermediary, and to allow users to act with full ownership for their data. What we’re building wouldn’t be possible without blockchain. While this new technology enables systems that weren’t possible only years before, it also comes with it’s challenges; namely around user experience and privacy.

User experience vs user autonomy & privacy

So far, in enterprise-grade and mainstream consumer facing applications of blockchain technology, we’ve seen that user experience and user autonomy/privacy have become polarizing goals; it seems like you can’t have both.

One of the best examples of this is how we handle communications with users.

How many times have you given your personal email to a decentralized social media, centralized wallet, web 3 hiring platform, or others?

By gathering user emails directly, platforms…

1. Inadvertently dox their users 😠
2. Incentivize users to provide fake or burner emails to protect their privacy (meaning messages don’t get read by users) 💀
3. Cause regulatory headaches — by collecting personal identifiable information, they have to comply with GDPR and similar laws on handling user data 🏛

The reason that these projects need to gather emails is because, today, email remains the most reliable way to reach users.

At TalentLayer, every platform that is building hiring tech using our toolkit needs reliable ways to talk with users regarding…

• Alerts on open job postings
• Alerts on job progress and applications
• Payment alerts
• Promotions

That’s why we’ve had the following question for a while.

“How can you reliably send emails to users without revealing the email address of the user”?

Can we send emails without knowing people’s emails? ✉️

What if there was a way to make sure an email alert gets to a user without your team having to know a user’s email.

This is the challenge that the iExec team set out to solve earlier this year.

iExec is a decentralized compute network that been privacy-focused from day 1 — leveraging confidential computing techniques to enable private data to be processed on untrusted remote servers.

The team at iExec developed a tool enabling private email sending leveraging their technology — Web3 Mail.

Web3 Mail enables…

⭐ Platforms to send emails to users while only knowing a user’s public wallet address

• Platforms can also enable their own users to send emails to one another, without the users knowing each others email addresses

⭐ Users to control who can email them and on what terms

• They can “allow” and “disallow” certain senders or demographics of senders (i.e. “I want to only receive outreach from platforms I’ve posted jobs on” or “I want to only receive outreach from hirers who have paid other freelancers successfully”)
• They can put up configurable paywalls (i.e. “If someone wants to email me, charge them $0.05 per email” or “If someone wants to email me charge them $0.50 per email, except if the user is a member of Developer DAO”

TalentLayer x Web3 Mail proof of concept

TalentLayer is partnering with iExec to build one of the first implementations of Web3 mail.

The scope of the implementation is to integrate web3 email directly into our open-source starter frontend; StarterKit. This frontend serves as starting point for many platforms building on TalentLayer.

The development of this project will be done on the iExec Sidechain (also known as the Bellecour blockchain) — where they’ve developed the beta version of Web3 Mail. To build our proof of concept there, we’ll be deploying a development-only version of TalentLayer’s contracts to the iExec Sidechain.

Mainstream user experience, build from principles first

We’re building the tools today that the world will use tomorrow. We have the ability to radically rethink how systems work from a principles first-standpoint.

How do we preserve user privacy?

How do we ensure users have full autonomy over their profiles and data?

We don’t have to sacrifice usability of our platforms to uphold these principles.

We’re super excited to work with the iExec team to explore more tools to help platforms, hirers, and workers connect in privacy-preserving ways.

TalentLayer Partners with iExec on Privacy-Preserving Email Marketing Tools for Hiring Platforms was originally published in TalentLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.