TalentLayer Universal Work System

TalentLayer solves for the captive work reputation problem.

We’ve been relying on digital intermediaries to facilitate work transactions for decades; the biggest ones being freelance marketplaces. These marketplaces have enabled huge freedom for people through cross-border job opportunities and income diversification. They scale reputation, which is usually a 1:1 behavior, through facilitating mutual reviews between people that provably work together.

While these reputation systems have caused a positive change, they also have a major point of failure; all reputational information is custodied by the intermediary. Users and their reputations are beholden to the decisions and success of the platform they use.

When engaging with intermediaries, users open themselves up to the following types of Platform Risk where reputations can be lost: Platform Success Risk: When a platform goes out of business, a user’s reputation is lost. Nation-State Risk: When a platform must comply with a new law or sanction in their country of incorporation that impacts who can use the platform. (i.e. Freelancer.com’s banned country’s list) Internal Policy Risk: When a platform changes internal policies. (i.e. Upwork’s political ban of Russian and Belarussian users) Moderation Risk: When a platform’s moderators selectively ban or shadowban users. (i.e. reported Codementor shadow bans)

The devastating impact of loss of identity for users can be completely avoided. This is possible by separating reputation management and storage from centralized platforms.

To do this, we have to change the incentives for platforms. Right now, platforms want to trap users; after all, that’s how they make money. This causes siloization and lowers competition.

Adopting an interoperable reputation system necessitates evolving the economic model that labor platforms rely on. TalentLayer proposes a decentralized backend for work with an economic model that benefits platforms and users equally.

We use the following technology: SOLIDITY, ipfs to store offchain data, REACT in frontend, INFURA to pin the IPFS data, MATERIALIZE to quickly build the front end, THE GRAPH to query on chain data, GOERLI TESTNET where everything is deployed. And our escrow contracts, based on Kleros Escrow, have been adapted to support any ERC 20 and allow for various sorts of job types including milestone-based payments, or even things like streaming payments.