I've been a freelancing in the digital marketing and audio production markets since 2012 and I am grateful of being able to participate in all this job opportunities I couldn't imagine being involved in due to my geographic and country's economic limitations. But freelancing gave me the opportunity of being independent from this limitations. I love working from home and not having to deal with 4 hours of traffic everyday. Here, it seems that people get cars for free or something because there's just too many cars and streets can't handled them anymore. Oh people love debt. But anyways. Is a much less stressful work experience than going to a traditional job, and I enjoy that. But not all is completely perfect in the freelance space currently.
Pros of freelancing:
Plenty of job opportunities.
Customised schedules.
Traffic free.
Unlimited earning potential.
Cons of freelancing:
Not consistent payment schedule.
employment benefits (retirement plans, insurances, paid vacations, etc.)
Distractions are everywhere.
Constant hunting for jobs.
Difficult dispute resolutions.
So what's https://ethearnal.com/ ?
Ethearnal is a p2p freelance platform powered by trustless smart contracts with a reputation system that economically incentivises participants to create a healthy ecosystem where freelancers and employers can thrive. It uses an escrow system to handle the money that flows in the platform, and it uses moderators to resolve disputes. I'll be getting in depth for each of these concepts but first, lets see how they are revamping the way an ICO works.
Basing their ICO in trustless smart contracts, guarantees the investor has full power of his/her investment by giving control of HOW and IF the teams spends the funds. Basically upon ICO completion, the smart contract automatically distributes the tokens to investors, and 10% of the total amount collected goes for the team. When the team runs out of that initial 10% of funding, the team starts a voting process. The team reaches the community on social media, showing in a transparent way, what they have done so far, and based on that, investors can vote by sending a 0 ETH transaction to the contract voting YES or NO to release the next 10% funding. The team is then, committed to complete tasks, grow the development, and have the complete responsibility of complete their roadmap as expected. The voting process works by needing at least 51% of token holders to vote in favor or against. That 51% of voting power comes from tokens, so each participant has a weight of voting regarding to the token quantity they hold. If not all investors participate in the voting process, because there's a risk millions in funding will stay locked if investors don't participate in it, then the system, if it lacks the 51% voting result, will lower the quorum needed by 10% every week until the quorum is achieved. This will ensure a YES or NO is met, instead of leaving things in limbo. I think this is a pretty awesome way of letting investors be involved in the project. Most ICOs require the investors to just trust the team to deliver and manage the funds the way they see properly. With this method, there's consensus.
Ok so what if there's a single investor that gets enough amount of tokens to represent the 51% for the voting power. Wouldn't that defeat the whole consensus idea?
Well, the team has a pretty nice measure to tame whales, not completely remove them but give everyone a fair chance of participation. The ICO will start at a predefined block, and the contribution for the first hour is capped to $1,000 worth of ether per unique sending address at it increments by $1,000 every hour. Of course people can create multiple wallets, but it would be economically unsustainable to cover the huge fees they would have to pay by doing this.
So ok, let's talk about the platform and its exciting innovations that brings to the freelancing community.
Freelancers and employers will be able to create listings and push them on the network using a web client. Once they find each other, they engage in a smart contract where they employer locks the value of the contract in an escrow method, pre-agreed amount of reputation tokens (ERT) are staked from each side, the listing creator sets the value of ERT needed to be able to engage in the smart contract. The timeframe is predefined, so if none of the possible outcomes is met, it releases everything back.
So what are the Ethearnal Reputation Tokens (ERT)?
ERT tokens are the way reputation is managed in the platform. You can earn ERT tokens and ETH by completing gigs, so actually, employers are paying you reputation which you can then keep or sell in the free market. This is awesome because both participants invest valuable resources to gain reputation in the system, which supports its monetary value in the markets. This tackles one of the main problems I experienced in upwork. To be a top freelancer you need to earn above a certain amount of money with different projects, but if you fail to keep up with constant earnings, your reputation as top freelancer dies and you have to re gain it again. What's even crazier is that if you haven't been active in a long time, they lock your profile as private until you re gain activity. This only makes it harder to regain the momentum you once had. In Ethearnal, no one owns your reputation but yourself.
So there's 3 possible outcomes of the smart contract. Both parties are happy so therefore the conditions in the smart contract are met, 99% of the value of the contract is rewarded for the freelancer and the other 1% is used to buy tokens in the market to then distribute half of the ERT to the freelancer and half to the employer. This creates a constant demand for the token in the markets by purchasing tokens every time a contract ends. In the case no one is satisfied with the outcome, the contract self-closes returning everything in escrow. Where it gets complicated is when only one part is unhappy. This is where moderators step in. This situation automatically opens a queue for moderators to step in. The pool of moderators can stake a minimum of 5% of the ERT predefined in the contract, and no more than 33.4%. So the employer, freelancer and moderators will have the same total reputation at stake. It's in everyone's interest to resolve the dispute in the most honest, transparent, fair and unbiased way. Why? Because the losing side reputation is distributed to the winning side. A lot of the moderators role in the system can be found in the whitepaper: https://ethearnal.com/ethearnal-whitepaper.pdf
So in summary pros and cons of Ethearnal
Pros
Platform based on 100% trustless smart contracts
Tokenized reputation.
Zero fees. No intermediaries.
Decentralized arbitrage to solve disputes.
Opportunity to appreciate your value over time.
Instant payments.
Cons
With the current situation of the cryptomarkets, not a lot of mainstream people know how to handle a wallet, let alone be familiar with smart contracts. So it might be difficutl, at first to gain robust activity in the platform at first.
Token price might be affected in the short term due to high speculation.
Current conditions of worldwide regulations of digital assets such as Ethereum, so it might be a more difficult process depending where you live, to cash out the Ether you earn in the platform.
I'm really excited to see this project live. I'm very into the idea of no intermediaries. Other platforms take 30%, 25% of the contract value and having zero fees in a freelance platform such as ethearnal will definitely impact the worldwide freelance industry that is currently 1.5 trillion dollars worth, and guess what? is ripe for disruption, just as how steemit disrupted the user generated content industry. Digest those numbers for a second: 1.5 trillions worth of freelancing effort that is ready to migrate to a more efficient ecosystem. The whole market cap of cryptocurrencies is currently just below half a trillion. Just think the impact this platform will have in the long run.
If you want to be more in touch with the project you can join their
Telegram: https://t.me/ethearnal
Medium: https://medium.com/@Ethearnal_com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethearnal_com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ethearnal/
You can also join their bounty campaign :)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2637093.0