Deconet is a the platform of interaction for freelancers and their clients.

Today, we’re releasing Offers, a feature that lets freelancers send potential clients milestone based proposals. Once accepted, clients can directly deposit funds into Smart Escrow for the project.

Clients and freelancers can be fully aligned around finances and expectations.

Smart Escrow keeps freelancers and clients aligned by having the client prepay for the milestone and with agreed upon timeframes for delivery and review of that milestone. If timeframes are exceed, the other party can (but doesn’t have to) claim the funds.

Deconet is live (and free) for members of the community, so if you’re reading this post, you’re included! To create your first offer, sign up here.

Why create Offers?
Two months ago, we launched a smart contract contracted powered freelancer marketplace. The freelancers on the platform have told us they like the behavior that’s incentivized from using Smart Escrow, and would like to be able to use the same functionally working with clients they already had a relationship with, so we added Offers!

Deconet supports work that’s done for fiat currency (currently via Stripe) as well as cryptocurrency (via USDC).

In order to send your first Offer, login to Deconet as a Maker and select ‘Create Offer”, and follow these steps.

If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas on how we can improve — please get in touch with us via the chat widget or at contact@deco.network

Feature Release: Public and Private Offers for Freelancers was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deconet is a managed freelance marketplace powered by blockchain enabled peer to peer escrow. We're pleased to let you know the product is live and projects are being built out at this very moment!

Blockchain UX?
As you can see in the video, Deconet has “solved” blockchain user experience. The marketplace is decentralized, yet no third party wallet or recovery phrase is needed. Read more about how this works.

Why launch as a managed marketplace?
Freelancer marketplaces are only as good as the quality of the talent you can connect with and the products that are delivered. All the talent on the supply side of Deconet is highly vetted so that entrepreneurs and companies getting their projects built via Deconet can do so with the best developers, designers, product managers, and creative directors on the planet.

What’s peer to peer escrow?
Money flows from clients to freelancers on Deconet via Smart Escrow. This system is powered by blockchain enabled smart contracts (aka programable money), so all parties can be sure that the work is going to get done and that everyone will be properly paid, with alignment on timeframes. Specifically, clients and freelancers agree on the length of time to deliver each milestone and the amount of time for feedback upon delivery of the milestones.

If you’re an entrepreneur or company looking to build and design with cutting edge teams, request an invite to Deconet!

The Future of Work, Powered by P2P Smart Escrow was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Deconet, we’re inspired to create a high-leverage, open-source technology that can evolve and thrive for hundreds of years in order to transform collaboration and innovation. This motivation guided our 2018 search for the path to tokenize the technology that will power the future of work.

With this context in mind, it’s important to understand where we are in 2019. Through a certain lens, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology can be seen as a new virtual jurisdiction (a system of rules), and it’s not clear to how this emerging virtual jurisdiction meshes with the nation-state jurisdictions we’ve grown up in. Given this uncertain legal landscape, we’re putting the plans for issuing platform token on hold for now, due to regulatory concerns.

As we move into our next phase of evolution, our goal at Deconet remains the same: We are working tirelessly to create a community-governed, user-facing technological infrastructure that captures network effects and fairly rewards those who create value for the network. In other words, our mission is unaltered, and the moment the legally sound path for platform tokenization becomes clear, Deconet will be one of the first projects to jump on issuing a token.

To the community that’s been with us, thank you so much! If you’re here for the same reasons we are, you’ll be pleased to know we’re only just getting started. Check out this post announcing our launch of the Deconet Services Marketplace. Deconet is a community project through and through, which means there are tons of way to get involved, including getting your projects built and getting paid for your design and development skills.

If you’ve got any questions, please jump into Telegram here or send a tweet. We’re so grateful to have you as part of the Deconet community and look forward to hearing from you.

Deconet Token Update was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our team has been building out the Deconet freelancer marketplace, and it’s running in a closed beta with select clients.

As a refresh, the Deconet curated freelancer marketplace is a place for start-ups and companies to get innovative products designed and build with curated teams of freelancers, designers, developers, and product managers.

Right now, clients on the demand side of this marketplace and the talent that they are paired with have their focus on building blockchain enabled applications and products. If you’d like to get blockchain products built, let us know here.

The marketplace is powered by our Smart Escrow system, which has passed a third party audited by Hosho with flying colors. Smart Escrow keeps clients and freelance talent aligned and working towards their common goal.Our focus right now is on adding a bit more polish to Deconet, specifically around decentralized app (“DApp”) user experience.

If you’ve ever used a DApp, you know that having to download a web wallet chrome extension (for example, MetaMask) then having to use a pen and paper to back up the 12 word seed phrase makes you a bit of a blockchain hobbyist. When Deconet launches, users won’t need to take either of these steps to be fully secure and backed up and decentralized! We’re looking forward to sharing more on this soon.

Media Mentions:

Deconet has been featured in Forbes, on Advancements with Ted Danson, and in the Decentranet Market Report.

Learn more about Deconet:

• Join the conversation on Telegram
• Subscribe for email updates
• Follow us on Twitter
• Subscribe to our subreddit

February 5th Deconet Update was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deconet is proud to announce a strategic partnership with GoChain. Dive into the official Press Release from our friends at GoChain here.

Deconet & GoChain Partnership Announcement was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Deconet, we’re building the open source public infrastructure to support new ways of working and value sharing for the freelance and skilled gig economy. In that pursuit, we’re taking some time to speak to the community and open source leaders of the most impactful blockchain projects.

Please enjoy the following conversation with Charles St. Louis, Polymath’s open source developer and developer community manager. Polymath is the securities token platform. In short, they connect issuers with KYC providers, smart contract developers, marketing services and legal experts who aim to raise capital by means of a security token offering.

If you’d like to chat with us about your blockchain projects plan and progress, though the lens of open source infrastructure. Please reach out!

Learn more about Deconet:

• Check out our whitepaper
• Dive into the product
• Join the conversation on Telegram
• Subscribe for email updates
• Follow us on Twitter
• Subscribe to our subreddit

Building Tokenized Digital Infrastructure, a conversation on Open Source and Security Tokens with… was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deconet is building infrastructure for developers to commercialize software, enabling teams all over the world to do work they love, on their own time. Our beta application, on the mainnet, is a decentralized marketplace for APIs and software licenses.

We’re pleased to announce a new partnership with MoneyTable, a Thailand-based fintech startup enabling improvements in worker welfare by facilitating financial and personnel work online. We’re aligned in our missions to support the online workers’ economy.

Deconet and MoneyTable will collaborate to launch new software products on our marketplace. Deconet will be providing technical assistance and support for skilled workers to create and manage collaborative projects using the platform. MoneyTable will be providing support for decentralized financial services.

Learn more about Deconet:

• Check out our whitepaper
• Dive into the product
• Join the conversation on Telegram
• Subscribe for email updates
• Follow us on Twitter
• Subscribe to our subreddit

Deconet — MoneyTable Partnership was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the tech lead at Deco.Network, I am constantly researching new ways for coders to get paid. Therefore, Gitcoin’s tipping mechanism piqued my interest. I was curious as to how exactly it worked, so on July 26th 2018 I started to dig into the code.

The simplest implementation of this kind of tipping mechanism would be to have Gitcoin hold the tips until they’re claimed. So, the sender sends the money to Gitcoin, and then Gitcoin lets a GitHub user claim it by using “Login with GitHub” on the Gitcoin site. This is not how Gitcoin does it, though.

Gitcoin understandably wants to avoid being the custodian of those tips until they’re claimed. So instead, they used a somewhat convoluted process involving Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme and IPFS. If the mixture of those two things already sounds a bit fishy to you, then congratulations, you probably figured out how I performed this exploit.

Sending a tip used to work like this:

1. The sender picks a GitHub username and amount of ETH to send, and hits “send”
2. Javascript running in the browser generates a brand new Ethereum private key.
3. That private key is split into 3 parts using Shamir’s secret sharing scheme with a threshold of 2 parts. That means you can combine any of the 2 parts to get the original private key back.
4. 2 of the parts are uploaded to IPFS
5. The IPFS hashes of those 2 parts that were uploaded to IPFS are uploaded to the Gitcoin DB.
6. The 3rd part is also uploaded to the Gitcoin DB.
7. The tip funds are sent to the address that corresponds with the newly created private key.

To claim a tip, a GitHub user does a “Login with GitHub” on the Gitcoin website. This causes Gitcoin to release the share of the private key it’s storing, and also the IPFS hash for another share. The user’s browser retrieves the share from IPFS, and combines it with the share that was stored in the Gitcoin DB. At this point, the user’s browser has the private key containing the tip money, and then presumably the user can sweep this into their own wallet (I didn’t actually check the code for this part, so this is just a guess)

So how did I break this mechanism and dump all the private keys?

I connected to the Gitcoin IPFS node, and asked it to list the hashes of all it’s stored items. I then retrieved all these items from IPFS and stored them in an array. I used a nested loop to try combining every item with every other item via Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme, and stored the result in another array. Then, I filtered the array of combined items, only keeping the ones that are the same length as an Ethereum private key

The result was an array with dozens of private keys, as you can kind of see in the screenshot below. The keys are censored, just in case.

Once I had an array of private keys, I looped over it to derive the corresponding Ethereum addresses. Then I checked all of them for a nonzero balance, which some keys did indeed have.

At this point, I contacted Kevin Owocki from Gitcoin, who promptly fixed the issue and rewarded me for finding this bug. I have to commend Kevin for the quick fix and generous reward.

Gitcoin is awesome!

Gitcoin is an amazing tool that is making serious progress in pushing open source forward. You should check it out if you haven’t already. I my opinion, it’s a model application for what you can do with Ethereum smart contracts.

You can view Gitcoin’s post on this issue here where they explain how they fixed it. Check it out!

How I hacked Gitcoin’s tipping mechanism was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deconet is building blockchain infrastructure for distributed cooperatives to commercialize software. Our beta application, on the mainnet, is a decentralized marketplace for APIs and software licenses.

Our CEO David and CTO Chris have just been featured on an episode of the Bad Crypto Podcast — a top cryptocurrency podcast, with over 5 million downloads.

Some of the many topics covered during this podcast include the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, how Deconet helps the open source community, why decentralized platforms for developers to collaborate are needed, and what our token does.

We’d love for you to listen to the episode here and let us know what you think! David and Chris’s segment starts at 37:00.

Learn more about Deconet:

• Check out our whitepaper
• Dive into the product
• Join the conversation on Telegram
• Subscribe for email updates
• Follow us on Twitter
• Subscribe to our subreddit

Deconet: Featured on the Bad Crypto Podcast was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deconet is building infrastructure for distributed organizations to commercialize software. We’re creating a future where developers build wealth fairly, sustainably, and on their own time.

That’s why our beta app is a decentralized marketplace for APIs and software licenses on the blockchain (you can read more about why software licenses belong on the blockchain here).

What’s the DSLA?

We designed the Deconet Software License Agreement (DSLA) as a custom license agreement with our developers’ interests at heart.

When you list a software license for sale on our marketplace and someone purchases it using BTC or ETH, the transaction information is recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. The transaction also records the parties involved, the time of the purchase, and the duration for which the agreement is valid.

The DSLA references the blockchain transaction, and the blockchain transaction references the DSLA.

In this way, the DSLA bridges on-chain transactions with our legal system, ensuring that the terms for a software license purchase on our marketplace have standing in court.

Read the DSLA in full here and let us know what you think!

Learn more about Deconet:

• Check out our whitepaper
• Dive into the product
• Subscribe for email updates
• Follow us on Twitter
• Join the conversation on Telegram
• Subscribe to our subreddit

Introducing the Deconet Software License Agreement was originally published in Deconet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.