# WorkFi: The Future of Employment on Ethereum - Mario Alves | LayerX

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 23:01
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Jmcnwg2l67A
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmcnwg2l67A

## Transcript

here so my idea for today is actually to explain you a little bit on how work is going to be like in the years to come and how that all relates with blockchain and ethereum and all of those things so starting with the first slide so this is like going back to the pre-industrial era and everything was test based you don't recall because we were never living in that in that era but still people would do crafting people would do well agriculture people would do small scale trading so everything that they produced they would go to a local market they would try to sell it make a few dollars or shells or whatever coin there was at the time and that was the uh the state of work at the time but after that came the Industrial Revolution and with that we started having fixed salaries fixed schedule in terms of work and it also allowed people to have a legal contract so in some cases being abided by laws it was uh having a safety uh net for for these uh for these workers and basically these changes brought some stability and safety to the workplace but at the same time they also provided uh centralized work and reduced the flexibility of people so what we're seeing right now it's basically uh Back to the Future scenario where people are starting to engage with what we call the economy and this means that now with remote working and everything being a digital uh working uh environment everyone can come and collaborate in a task-based approach again but still uh what we're seeing is that it also brings some challenges so specifically we have trust issues so we don't know if that organization that I'm working for on a task-based approach is going to pay me at the end of the month uh how can we handle payments so if I'm working from uh I don't know from India and I'm getting paid by a U.S organization how do payments are process it if it it's by Fiat takes a lot of time and there isn't like much job security within this framework so ethereum actually comes to to save the day uh by the way this uh image is an image that is uh on on web3hub that we have uh in our in my hometown in Porto Portugal so if you guys want to visit it uh feel free because you'll see this uh picture in in real life which is good uh but anyway going back to the conversation so ethereum and other blockchains provide uh the solution of smart contracts and these smart contracts basically make this uh problem or these challenges diminish so it ha it enhances stressability it ensures that there is payment security and it boosts the transparency overall in this new digital gig economy so basically the topic of today this was just to give you a context is what we like to call work fight so it's a mix between work Plus Finance so the same as you have in D5 but applied just for for the work uh and this is what we believe that will be the future of work so this new decentralized employment movement or infrastructure and what this model does is of course leveraging on top of smart contracts and blockchain Technologies and this transforms the way that we do freelancing work we do remote working and other types of work and by using tools that are inherent to the blockchain uh space like decentralized social graphs Soul bound tokens we can now have a transversal reputation system that you can take from one platform to the other like if you work for example for freelancing.com you cannot take your reputation from that platform to anywhere else so this allows you to actually bring that reputation with you on your wallet and at the same time it also enhances the trust between organizations and workers because all the interactions are done through smart contracts and they have uh what what I will explain a little bit later a validation system and yeah regarding payment so it ensures basically fair and timely payments uh which I will also get into that later so again uh speaking about validators uh they are in this scenario the pillars of trust so instead of an organization being the one that says if that worker has done a good job or not or the worker itself um there isn't much uh validity to it so uh now we are seeing like many uh platforms that introduce this validator or Creator uh system that allows uh for uh all of these interactions to happen more fairly and uh and more um close to to what has actually happened um so the idea here is uh to reduce bias to increase the fairness uh both in terms of payment but also in terms of the structure of the work itself and to promote a higher standard of work okay so now going in to what we're doing inside our company uh so our company layer X is essentially uh where three uh Builder Studio that uh develops uh products for both organizations and developers we want to increase that uh part of that last part in terms of community but now we're solely focused on the development part and we do it through hackathons and bounties so one of the platform that we have on what or one of the products is the taikai platform which is a web3 hackathon platform and it's that platform that is being used for these Belgrade hackathon it's about the platform that has been used for East Dublin last week and for many East events web 3 events but not only so we also work with web to clients such as the European commission Nissan Mercedes Pfizer Tick Tock so uh pretty much everyone in the industry that wants to do hackathons can come to us uh and the reason why we created this is because we believe that hackathons are also a good way for you to kick start the relationship with one specific organization and that can eventually lead into uh being hired for that organization or start working for that organization in a freelancing base and then we recently acquired another company called bpro and bpro has brought uh two two products one of them which is the one in the middle be Pro network is a web3 protocol uh to create and manage bounties so bounties are specifically tasks in this case we're focusing more on development tasks but in the future it can be many more and what it allows you to do is uh basically to as an organization to launch your bounties there uh you can launch in whatever chain there is available it's actually a multi-chain product and then a developer can come and simply select the ones that they want to participate they participate using GitHub at the moment but it will be possible to use many more Platforms in the future um so that is basically what we're targeting for specifically within the workfy space and then there is DAP kit so dabkit is a open source project that we developed for the community it's a framework so that people can go from the web to site as a developer to quickly start their web 3 projects and the reason why I bring this product and the reason why I'm mentioning them is because we have some interesting use cases for this workfy movement so one of them is the what we call the pops the proof of participation this is an nft that we award for hackers for mentors for judges of a specific hackathon that a test that you were a part of that hackathon and that attests your position in that hackathon and basically it goes to your wallet so you can take it with you you can build your own digital CV with it you can do whatever you want with it and eventually in the future some platforms will require some kind of credentials and these can be the credentials that you can use and we're also focused on bringing digital identity for the hackathon space at the moment we have integrated ens with our platform so it is possible for you to have your ens name on on your profile and it identifies you uh as a person inside the community and the ecosystem in the future we want to create more um of these uh of these possibilities of bringing digital identity into the platform and we're looking for partners also in that space we're also thinking of integrating with lens protocol so that we can tap also into the social graph that is being built over there so there are many possibilities uh within this realm of digital identity okay so speaking about the use case for uh bounties for bpro network uh in this case um going back to the product uh everything that is done through the bounties is on chain so an organization when they launch a bounty they say what tasks they want to be developed they put their GitHub repository and then they have to basically stake a specific amount of tokens into the protocol so that money is the reward for the developer that submits the job so when someone delivers the work and that work gets approved they immediately get paid through their wallets so there is no third parties there is no intermediary it's all done through smart contracts this allows for people to get paid on time to get paid through the token that um that they see that is published on on the Bounty they can even request the organization to pay the bounty in specific tokens so there is all of these uh possibilities that allow for uh for these workers to be able to do it in a in an easier way and there is um the Creator aspect to it as well so there is a community that are not developers and that are not there to actually solve bounties but uh more uh into creating uh the uh work that is being done so people that review the code that review the work of other people and that have a percentage of the bounty that is delivered to them so it's an incentive for them to um basically look out if that solution is adequate or not for that specific organization so wrapping up and looking ahead on uh what the future is is going to bring in this space so for me uh and for our organization the future is multi-chain and interoperable uh sorry for is here Maxis or any other Maxis but uh I think that this will allow for people to be able to teleport their credentials to any chain that they want uh for any job or task platform in the future and also account abstraction will also be very important to drive the next billion users so by using wallets in which you don't have to be concerned about saving your own private Keys seed phrase all of these technical aspects that sometimes make it difficult for users will allow for these interactions within the the work five space to happen more naturally in the type of a phone so I think this will also be important and will make significant change another aspect is the digital identity part so we are now seeing uh some solutions regarding soulbound tokens we are also seeing some solutions regarding zero knowledge proofs to appear there are some cool projects that are developing it as well there is one specifically which is called sismo basically you can generate a ZK proof on whatever nft that you have and that allows you for you to basically show what you want to show in terms of your credentials so you don't have to show your old wallet where you perhaps have other stuff in there you can just show whatever you need to show for that specific platform and I think this will also change the game especially within the workspace uh okay so this is not related to with work five but more on uh some things that we're also seeing in the market and in this case it's more on the future of collaboration or the future of Entrepreneurship and we've now introduced a concept within the taikai uh platform so the hackathon platform which is taikai garden and it's a way for all of these hackathon projects um that uh that that are pretty much wasted after hackathon to gain a new life and we want to uh allow people to be able to look out for other teammates after a hackathon to be able to look out for mentors after a hackathon perhaps look out for funding to turn a hackathon project into an actual startup so that is the concept that we're grabbing it's not specifically related with the work environment but something related with Innovation and Entrepreneurship which is also very very relevant and yeah so uh we uh basically have a token that will be the glue uh for for all of these interactions to happen so wrapping up um again I'm seeing workfy as the New Horizon um that that is about to turn all of our lives uh so if you look at Major protocols that are already uh seeking for developers or other types of profiles they're already selecting their people through bounties so it's been something that they have been addressing a lot some protocols have been giving grants and smaller grants for one person team that wants to create something that wants to create a project so for me uh and and for us as an organization we believe that this is going to play a more significant role not just in the web uh the web free space but also in the web to space so uh step by step I believe that we are shifting the whole work environment to become more decentralized and uh it's what I hope for at least uh to to happen okay so this was a small pitch I would like to again thank you very much um for coming and for listening so I uh you have uh here my my contacts on the left and you have my presentation presentation on the right in case you want to download it so now I would open uh up for questions if you have any I'd be delighted to to answer all of those yes just a quick question about the bounties I really like the idea uh can you do it in a sense if you talk from the Enterprise level can we do it in a sense that um not the whole world sees what we put it as a Bound in a sense that you limit to a certain number of people or limit to only your employees or only to the pool of candidates is it possible yeah that's a good question yeah uh that is a good question so at the moment it is possible on the hackathon solution we do what we call private hackathons so some of these use cases that I mentioned like the Mercedes one Tick Tock one was actually a private hackathon within the uh ecosystem of that company for the Bounty side of things we are developing that for some organizations so some organizations come to us uh either it's like in a public sense or in a a closed sense they can launch what we call a bounty Network that allows them to select the tokens that they they want to use for payments the tokens that they want to use for the creation part who can access that so which organizations can launch bounties there it can be for example DCM Foundation but you can also be projects that are within the ethereum ecosystem and the same thing for the participant side of things and the same for the Creator side of things because at the moment for you to become a Creator within uh within our protocol you need to stake our token and that's how it is possible for you to for you to become a Creator and review other people's code so with this process of token getting we can somewhat overcome this this challenge how would I be satisfied as a bounty submitter that the curator is doing his job well and so and also the developer of course is supporting the correct code so I have the problem always on GitHub and I'm not on GitHub on Bitcoin for example but a few people submitting their Solutions so I can choose from that solution or tell them okay that's not correct and you should change it like this but in this case I think it's fully escrowed and so if I'm not satisfied so how do you solve the this kind of situations this is a very good question because from an organization standpoint you have two options delegate it fully to the community or you have a say in it there are several ways to do it on one side what happens typically is yes you have the community evaluating other people's work and you have what we call a dispute resolution period so you by having a specific amount of token stake can dispute that solution or can dispute that proposal and say okay this guy or this girl has reviewed this in a bad manner I don't agree with it and I propose for it to be X Y and Z so you can uh actually do that as an organization that's one solution the other one um so we're in giving out an example we're working with the Aurora um uh chain uh Aurora is an evm um inside the near ecosystem and they decided to create their own Bounty Network as I've described uh they just launched bounties it's supposed to be for their Community using their own tokens but they created a specific token for the creation parts which allows them to have full control on who they delegate that token so they can say Okay I want all the projects of my ecosystem to be able to create the the the work that has been done I want only uh the Aurora Foundation to be able to do that or whatever you want so you can simply select what suits you best uh depending on how much work and how much interaction you want to have with the community thank you more questions right I guess we're all hungry for lunch uh so before I wrap up just wanted to say that we have our booth uh upstairs so if you want to come chat a little bit uh we're we're going to be there uh we also have some cool stickers and we have a pool app for you to to Mint so again thank you very much uh it was a pleasure to be here and I'm really enjoying East Belgrade so far thank you thank you [Music] okay let's grab lunch yeah please