Challenges

Opportunities

The Current Jobs Ecosystem works in silos, the jobs on platforms are bound to be within it which limits the employers to hire from within the platform and for talent, a limited number of opportunities. It pushes them to be on multiple platforms/channels to maximize their need.

Enter Layers Jobs, Layers Offers an open jobs portal where anyone can post any type of job (Gig, Bounty, Long-Term) and before applying/hiring the history of the other user can be verified without depending on a third party.

The jobs can be posted and accessed universally through Layers’ Open API. Employers don’t need to depend on a few platforms to get the best talents and neither do talents to get the jobs.

Problems

Vendor Lock-in

In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

In simple words, the data is locked inside the platform, making it hard for the user to use another platform and in the case of freelancing, the data reflects the experience. Imagine having years of experience inside a platform that can’t be used directly anywhere else.

What if the data can be accessed through API?

Well, it will look like the problem has been solved but the data is still coming from a centralized source and it would be hard to prove the authenticity of the data.

That’s why there is a need for a decentralized and open infrastructure in Freelancing, that not only provides freedom from vendor lock-in but also ensures its authenticity, so whether the platform is there or not the user data will always be there. They can be used wherever their owner (user) finds it comfortable.

Authenticity

Freelance is global and it is always about dealing with unknown people but trusting them through a third party is not a good approach. How will a party know whether they should trust the other party? It generally ends up trusting the information provided by the third party or no information and there is no way that the user can verify whether the provided information is authentic or not. It’s not even in the hands of third parties to provide a method where the user can verify it.

Consider the following scenario:

The employer puts a job and there are dozens of freelancers bidding on it and there is no way for the employer to authenticate the freelancer without any third party or vice-versa, They both have to depend on a third party (platform) for it. Is there a way to verify how many jobs the freelancer has done, his history of work, and reviews given by his past employers? How much money the employer has paid to freelancers?

Can all the above be verified without depending on a third party (platform)?

Decentralized systems solve this by keeping track of the history of each data point and making sure it’s immutable and can’t be tempered. With decentralized data sources such as blockchains, the viewer can always look at the history and verify.

Centralized Storage

All the delivery of work in freelancing goes through the centralized data storage providers which sacrifice privacy and give them control over user’s data.

It’s time to put the users back in control of their data. Vault is the data storage solution provided by Layers for a resilient, efficient, and decentralized data storage experience where users are in control of their data.

Payments

Payment lives at the center of every job but the challenge is external parties mostly control them and can’t be linked with rules defined in the agreement contract. The agreement contract and payments are separate due to their technical architecture so it doesn’t matter what terms and conditions are mentioned in the agreement, the payments can never be enforced according to them without interference from a third party.

Freelancers need to be assured when using escrow services that it will be unbiased and payments will be released according to the agreement but due to the involvement of third parties and platform rules it’s not always that easy. The freelancer can’t do anything if something goes wrong.

Conclusion

In summary, From creating an account to defining skills to handling the payments, for everything users need to trust the third-party platform. These problems are not only with the existing web2 platforms they extend to the so-called web3-based platforms because 90% of application architecture is still centralized and the process is still the same but “web3 tech has allowed changing this whole thing”.