The problem TalentLayer Universal Work System solves

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.

Challenges we ran into

The Final Countdown
At 5:30 AM we had a very serious team meeting after pulling an all-nighter. We has just lost hours worth of frontend work due to the “The Case of The Ghost Frontend” and were so behind on setting up our sub-graph that we hadn’t even started pulling in data to our UIs. We had one smart contract bug still hanging, and it was looking pretty dire.

We discussed two plans: 1) Make a mock-up of our frontends and pause work on the smart contracts and graph or 2) Lean in and try to get our full goal scope done despite the barriers. Even though I was feeling like option 1 was the most pragmatic, the team’s answer was “this is hard, but we’re optimistic”. Over the next hour, the team united to solved each other’s issued one by one. If we had taken the easy route, we wouldn’t have shipped as nearly as full of a product.

The Case of The Ghost Frontend
At about 5 AM our frontend designer realized he’d lost access to about 4 hours worth of work after some merge conflicts. We all came around to diagnose with the usual options - rolling back to prior versions of the branch, but we didn’t have any luck locating the files he shipped. Just as we started to accept our fate, and our frontend designer started re-working old versions of pages, certain pages started to mysteriously re-appear. We stopped everything and were able to get ALL of our frontend pages back after about 30 minutes of digging. We were so relieved.