Introduction

We each have only 24 hours in the day. Where we choose to allocate this attention will increasingly determine who creates economic value and who destroys economic value. – John Hagel, Co-Chairman, Centre for the Edge

Background

Centralized platforms for human capital and gig economies like Fiverr, Taskrabbit, Upwork, and Mechanical Turk have their workforces distributed throughout the world, but existing inefficiencies are financially hurting both employers and freelancers. Today’s platform participants are losing up to 40% of their wages in platform transaction fees, with long transaction periods, and they are not receiving the corresponding value in return.

Additionally, manually verifying the accuracy of results from workers is difficult. To ensure quality results, requesters currently rely on redundancy, oftentimes having up to 15 workers perform the same task to form a consensus.

Access to these centralized platforms also require identification and verification, cutting off both skilled and unskilled workers who do not meet the right requirements or are unbanked. A staggering 38% of the world’s population does not have a bank account, hurting their ability to work in and contribute in the centralized platforms.

Overview

Pendulum is the protocol that enables a decentralized marketplace for human capital that helps employers find the best suited freelancers for their tasks and projects, and workers can get paid for what their time is really worth.

The Pendulum dapp enables work ranging from micro tasks to projects and allows differentiated, market-based pricing for different levels of workers. In addition, the profiles and reputation matches bounties to workers based on their skills and interest while providing the necessary trust to prevent bad actors from gaming the ecosystem. Finally, the confirmation of work through vetted verifiers enables work to be verified through consensus without the excess redundancy required in current centralized systems.

Unlike competitors such as Gems, Pendulum allows both micro and macro tasks enables differentiated, market-based pricing for people matches bounties to workers based on their skills and affinity.