(I am not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. Please DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!)
Gems is a protocol for contracting workers to perform micro tasks. Workers stake tokens in order to prove validity of their tasks and earn a reusable computed trust score, enhancing the cost-efficiency of the network while democratizing access to scalable micro task workers.
Micro tasks are small tasks that can be completed by individuals independently over the Internet that are usually part of a larger project. These micro tasks can aid machine learning researchers in building data sets for training or for large corporations such as Facebook, Google, Twitter etc to refine production ready solutions and facilitate further model training. Even the Chinese government uses 2 million micro-taskers to censor the internet.
The two largest crowdsourced data collection platforms are Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Crowdflower, which focuses on building data sets for AI. In 2015 the World Bank Report estimated that these two platforms would quadruple their revenue between 2013 and 2016.
Problem
• High fees charged to requesters using MTurk seeking micro-task workers (minimum of 20% plus another 5% fee for workers with a good track record)
• Tasks with 10 or more assignments are charged an additional 20% fee (therefore these task packages cost the requester a minimum of 40% in fees)
• Reports that over 50% of MTurkers earn less than $5 / hour
• Crowdflower charge similarly high fees - $3,000 ‘onboarding’ fee for requesters + $1,500 / month subscription fee on an annual contract. Workers are paid separately to this in addition to another 15% fee on any payments to them.
• Non-managed platforms do not supply interfaces for task completion therefore requesters either build their own tools or pay large fees to have them outsourced.
• A large number of potential micro-taskers are unbanked making the industry unavailable to them.
• Problems with lost or delayed payments diluted by the high fees.
• Onerous and privacy invasive signup process for workers, which is often delayed for lengthy periods of time.
Solution
Gems is a decentralised, open-source human task crowdsourcing protocol build on the Ethereum blockchain. It relieves the need to worry about task verification, trust or payments and rewards ‘fair players’. It consists of a staking mechanism to ensure task completion, a trust mechanism to track worker integrity and payment system to reduce transaction fees.
The Gems Platform (an application using the Gems Protocol) connects requesters and human workers (miners), removing socioeconomic barriers otherwise present in centralised systems.
The Gems Protocol, Gems Platform and modules built on top of it are known as the ‘Gems Network’. The Gems Network addresses the following:
• Removing the ‘middleman’ therefore reducing large fees
• Verifying accuracy of results from crowd sourced tasks
• Supplying and building reusable interfaces
• Removing the need for existing bank infrastructure
• Incentivising and disincentivising miners and requesters by staking tokens on the validity of theirs and others’ work
• Reducing friction for approval of workers – not requiring verification of identity for miners to complete tasks
• Payments on the blockchain via Gems allowing unbanked miners to do work and reducing transaction fees
Current State of Product
Gems have released an alpha of the Gems platform which the Gems community are currently testing at a rapid rate.
Team
Co-founder – Rory O’Reilly
Rory is a Harvard dropout who studied psychology and economics. After dropping out of Harvard he founded gifs.com. He is a Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 under 30 recipient for his expertise in consumer tech. There is not a lot of information to be found on Rory apart from this and his LinkedIn profile hasn’t been updated to include Gems.
Co-founder – Kieran O’Reilly
Kieran studied computer science at Harvard (and dropped out) and was also a co-founder of gifs.com as the CTO. The gifs.com clients include Google, Netflix and Autodesk. He is also a Thiel Fellow and named by Forbes in their 30 under 30 list.
The Gems advisors include a ‘who’s who’ of the tech world. The include:
Biz Stone who is the co-founder of Twitter and Medium. Jelly.Inc magazine named him Entrepreneur of the decade and by Time as being one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World
Joey Krug, the co-founder of Augur and Co-Chief Investment Officer at Pantera Capital. He is also a Thiel Fellow and writer at Forbes Magazine.
Ben Maurer the co-founder of reCAPTCHA, which was acquired by Google in 2009. He worked at Google until 2010 and left to join Facebook.
Luis Cuende, the co-founder of Aragon, a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and MIT TR35 honouree. He has co-founded Stampery (a blockchain startup) and developed the world’s first Linux distribution with face login.
Joe Urgo, the co-founder of district0x and Sourcerers.io. He was previously the Operations Manager at Coinbase and a derivatives trader at Three Arrows Capital.
Community
Gems has managed to build a massive following on social media. Latest count is as follows:
Telegram – over 47,000 members
Twitter – over 7,000 followers
Token Metrics
To be announced mid January 2018.
Things I Like
• Superstar team and advisors with the knowledge and connections to make some serious shit happen.
• Solving a real world problem through use of the blockchain.
• Very large and supportive community.
• Technology is an open sourced protocol.
• Alpha just released on the testnet.
Things I Don’t Like
• I struggle to find anything.
Will I Be Investing?
At the moment is a pretty strong YES but I’m not completely sure yet. I need to see the token metrics before I make a final decision but there is a LOT of hype around this ICO and I like the concept and team. If the token metrics stack up then I’m definitely going in heavy – it’s a project I strongly believe in with a top level team behind it.