ff3 is a community that believes in the power of Web3, and the potential it holds for the next generation of founders, startups, and investors
Web3’s harshest critics take aim at its utility, or perceived lack thereof. It’s written off as a hype-fuelled passing fad, something which in the past could have made you a quick dollar, or more recently, drained your life savings.
We’ve shared thoughts about the end of the honeymoon and the decline of speculation, while also predicting shifts towards the long term use cases of Web3, and how it can unlock new business models and dynamics that can create a fairer, more equitable economy.
We wanted to share progress on one of the latest projects from our Venture Studio: Prism, a platform for freelancers to build their reputation on-chain. This is being built in the true spirit of Web3: both focused on and driven by its community, with an in-built tokenomics structure to incentivise quality and sustainable growth, proving what we believe to be one of the many long term use cases of the blockchain.
Read on to find out:
The problem we’re addressing with existing freelancer marketplaces
How our dual-token system will work, and how it will drive the marketplace
The key decisions we’ve made in underlining Prism’s web3 functionality
The remaining challenges we’re facing
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Addressing the freelancer marketplace problem
COVID has permanently disrupted the world of work. It has fractured the relationship between employers and employees, both in WHERE you work, and WHAT you look for in a job. This snowballed into the so-called Great Resignation, when a quarter of the workforce left full-time jobs in early 2022.
In its wake, we’re seeing a tidal wave transition towards freelance work. Around 50% of millennials are already freelancing, and freelancing is expected to become the dominant workforce category in the US over the next decade.
There’s a number of factors that have propelled this trend. Younger generations are increasingly drawn towards ‘portfolio careers’, where instead of a single source of income you juggle several jobs. The experiences you do are just as important as the roles you have (and the credentials of the employers you work for). On the employer side, many companies have turned to freelancers to replace permanent staff and cut overhead costs. Freelancers also offer companies, particularly startups, greater flexibility to fill immediate skill needs as needs evolve.
As a result, there’s been a rise of freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr; there’s even been a Web3 solution in Braintrust, the first ‘user owned talent network’. Yet freelancing through these marketplaces comes with a significant number of challenges:
1. No one teaches you how to freelance
This includes everything from setting fees to writing employment contracts: but also learning professional skills like project management. Equally, employers may have limited experience working with freelancers.
2. Personal relationships remain pivotal
Referrals cut down search time and expedite the vetting process for employers. But if word of mouth is still king—how do you get started? There are currently no existing ways to scale this ‘trust’ beyond your personal network.
3. Existing platforms commoditize talent
Upwork & Fiverr prioritise platform growth, making these marketplaces saturated and their freelancers simple commodities competing with one another. For employers, how can you pick from among the crowd?
4. Platform fees fuel churn and reduce quality
Good talent tends to leave as soon as they build a network to avoid high platform fees, diluting the overall talent pool quality and damaging loyalty. Employers only return for the quantity and diversity of talent to address new talent needs quickly, not expecting quality
Enter Prism
We paid attention to the success of Braintrust, while also acknowledging its clear shortcomings: namely its focus on tokens to drive growth (akin to the high marketing spend of Web2 platforms, and prioritising quantity over quality), as well as its limited use of blockchain’s full potential.
We strongly felt that blockchain offered a strong possibility to solve some of the existing talent marketplace problems, a chance to create a trustless system in which your reputation as a freelancer existed on chain. We also wanted to move away from a backwards-looking, credentialing system, and towards something that was forward-looking and more meritocratic.
This forward-looking approach also replicates a concept familiar to traditional careers: the idea of progression. Could we create a way of collecting experiences (via tokens) to replicate the milestones you get in a typical career? This was also our way of enticing users to keep using the marketplace, keeping quality high.
This is how Prism was born. Prism is a professional platform enabling the future of decentralised work by bridging the gap between talent and employers efficiently and equitably through on-chain reputation-building. Instead of being based on ‘trust’ from people in your immediate network, we’re building a ‘trustless’ labour market.
Our goal is to create an additive, rather than extractive, community where each member has a stake in the success of the whole. Furthermore, we envision Prism will provide opportunities for professional development that freelancers currently lack, because the long-term growth and success of our community is core to Prism’s success.
There are three key components to Prism:
Wallet
Your wallet is essentially your profile: a unique chain of professional experiences (like your CV), referrals, and tokens that you’ve earned through the platform. This cross-chain wallet can be carried through the growing ecosystem of work-related products—like a ‘professional passport’.
On Prism, users establish “proof-of-merit” via referrals backed by tokens as a signal of confidence in the referee. By placing the recommender's reputation and compensation on the line, references no longer automatically indicate calibre—employers don’t have to take a stranger's word for it since referrers now have real skin in the game. This creates a more meritocratic, higher-quality, “trustless” labour market.
One key decision we’ve made is to give users total control over aspects of their identity and data they share through the wallet: a clear opposite to platforms that monetise user data. Users will also be able to share multiple profiles of themselves, depending on varying levels of permissions that they grant employers: in some cases this may be total anonymity. Moreover, you’re directly compensated with tokens for any data you do share, thus creating an economy around valuable data for which employers are willing to pay to access.
This was driven by DEI: you can’t remove employer’s biases, but you can remove some of the factors that drive their biases, like names that suggest gender or ethnicity. It also tapped into an important trend in Web3: we’ve seen many examples of total strangers, often under alter egos, rallying around certain projects and building a tribal sense of loyalty, whether this is a game, an NFT collection, or a professional association.
Tokens
Tokens underpin the whole Prism platform. We’ll issue two types of token:
Prism soulbound tokens ($BRCK)—these are non-fungible, non-transferrable, and unique to each user. These are minted for each job completed (like entry points on your CV), building on-chain provenance around user’s careers with an emphasis on reputation and trust: this is a key point of differentiation from other professional soulbound tokens, which focus on credentialing rather than quality of contribution.
Prism tokens ($PRSM)—a non-fungible, transferable token that can be traded on the platform or on coin exchanges. Coins will be minted as rewards for on-platform work such as joining, referring/matching, completing tasks, jury duty, etc. The primary use for $PRSM on the platform will be staking
The long-term vision is for Prism to become a DAO governed by its active users, with $BRCK tokens becoming a tool for governance. The primary function of $PRSM tokens, meanwhile, will be for staking—a mechanism for putting your own reputation on the line to give your references more weight. This is key to maintaining quality in the marketplace.
Community
Joining Prism’s community has a dual benefit. Primarily, you can come there to find work: Prism wallet holders will have exclusive access to the jobs board.
In addition, however, there’s an opportunity to be a part of building and contributing to Prism’s growth and governance. In Web3, we’ve seen how DAOs are showing nascent but certainly potent forms of collective governance, building communities that can help support your growth, answer questions, maintain quality of the platform, as well as root out malicious actors.
This will help fulfil an HR function: providing valuable career support and development opportunities that freelancers currently lack compared to full-time employees at large organisations. They’ll also perform a governance function, stepping in for dispute resolution, for instance. The latter is key—we want to make sure that employers are held to account as much as freelancers are.
Jobs to be done & challenges to be solved
We’ve been working on this iteration of Prism for close to three months: so as you can expect, we’re very much still in our infancy. There are a number of challenges that we’re still aware of and conscious of overcoming:
🤝 Disintermediation
This is when, once a connection is made, interactions move off platform (a problem faced by any illiquid marketplace). Essentially, the value we offer needs to exceed the fees charged to either the freelancer or the employer. For employers, this might include incentives to hire new talent, or offering priority access to ‘preferred’ talent; for freelancers, we need to emphasise the narrative around on-chain reputation building, as well as future benefits they might get from being engaged on the platform.
🧠 Mental shortcuts
If reputation is a central aspect of the platform, it would be very natural for employers to go straight for those top-ranked freelancers, leaving those lower down in deficit. There’s not an easy answer to this, except for some of the same mechanisms as above, encouraging the hiring of new talent.
We’re very early in our journey with Prism, and we hope to keep sharing posts about our progress. You can join our Discord server here, and you can join our waitlist here—and as ever, if you have any thoughts or suggestions on what we might be missing, please feel free to comment below.
👀Opportunities at Prism
We’re hiring for a number of key positions at Prism.
Founder/CEO—executing the build & launch of the company. You’ll receive a competitive salary, get hands-on support from our team, and £150k invested in the business if the product is successfully launched
Tech Lead—building out the technical vision of the company
Email farah@foundersfactory.co for more information.
📚 Recommended reading
Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul—the original whitepaper on soulbound tokens by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. You can read a shorter summary here
How will 100 million independent workers find & manage work in 2030
That’s all folks - thanks for reading! We’re building an exciting new Web3 community, and we want everyone to be a part. So if you enjoyed reading, please give this post a share.