1. Research showed that around 59% of freelancers were owed $50,000 or more for completed work, with 72% of respondents saying they still have outstanding invoices yet to be paid by their clients.

   https://www.independenteconomy.org/our-blog/getting-paid-in-the-independent-economy

2. Project acquisition was chosen to be the biggest problem in the freelance career by 52% of the respondents of a survey

3. About 22% of freelancers feel that contract negotiation is a really big problem. The vagueness of the demand of clients that leads to dissatisfaction is often a pain point for freelancers.

   https://freelancermap.com/market-study

4. Freelancers often struggle with juggling different projects at the same time. Due to this, there can be a problem in scheduling a task according to the preferences of a client.

1. Clients face a backlash when the work they demanded is not delivered on time or is not at par with their expected quality which is a major issue surrounding growing businesses that rely heavily on the freelancing community.
2. Clients have to go through a lot of time consuming processes in connecting and delegating work with the freelancers.
3. Clients feel great difficulty in accessing and managing their payments. A lot of ongoing gigs, and a lack of trustworthy universal automation payment mechanism leads to management issues.
4. Owing to the ease with which a freelancer can fake their skills, they often might end up stuck in a gig with an incompetent freelancer. No immutable way of freelancer skill/history verification.

An in-depth understanding of the market space is extremely important when we’re dealing with such a revolutionary technology, for which the skepticism against is equally high.

Considering the increasing bearish state, the world is entering into against crypto, and specifically India (Due to increasing Taxation), decision of the domain we wish to tap into was a really essential one

After much discussion and thought, despite the fact that the freelance sector is way bigger, we decided to start with, pretty intuitively, the web3 developers itself for they are the only ones, who, at the current moment recognize and understand how these systems actually work and how blockchain isn’t only about Dogecoin.

Observation and analysis of the existing Socio-Economic set-up of the gig sector tell us that just a listing platform cannot be complete solution.

We have realized that the problem can be catered into three major domains:

• Payment, Escrow, and Product Management💸
• Listing📃
• Validation of Work done🤝

Sticking to a Payment and Product management system and becoming a needed tool for Freelancers is what we are aiming for in the initial stages, soon making our way into the Listing and Validation domain as and when we develop the community to ensure the smooth functioning of the same, with the aim of becoming a one-stop platform 3-5 years down the line.

The reason for the above path is attributed to the very nature of problems, Both validation and Listing, especially Word of Mouth based, need active communities and models like Social Commerce to support them.

Furthermore, harnessing the network effort of the increasing trust in the technologies being employed due to increasing awareness and education, we would subsequently be able to tackle practically every freelance domain, from web2 to music to art.

The ultimate aim is to become for freelance, what Google is to search for something.

Today is the age where transparency and data security are highly valued in all fields. Blockchain, with its decentralization, puts the power in the hands of the users; transparency is something that is majorly lacking from the existing incumbents. Example: Upwork is Completely client-oriented; Not only is the power taken, but also the freelancer is devoid of essential transparency, which is something that blockchain guarantees, furthermore, RevereLabs has put forward mechanisms to ensure, not only the freelancer but also the client is increasingly ensured work security (Explained later)

This enables us to establish a model wherein we can harness the power of blockchain to fulfill our CSR (Corporate social responsibility) by giving control and transparency in the hands of the people who so much deserve it. Furthermore, the Incorporation of blockchain enables us to increase the flexibility of our service multiple times, and the amalgamation of NFTs and Tokenization always possesses the power to change the socio-economic dynamics of social platforms in a way that former web2-based incumbents may dare not even think about.

Similar to the model of Huddle01, where we see how the introduction of blockchain could revolutionize a field formerly captured by their respective web2 incumbents (Zoom), and subsequently, how readily people shift to web3 alternatives as a part of ensuring the promise of trust, privacy, and transparency, not to mention the immense flexibility in the use case of Huddle01 with their tokenization and NFTs.

We introduce a No-code Smart-Contract based Escrow system:

• No-code: As the freelancer or client, the complete power lies in your hands, customize the flexible templates as per your needs with just a few clicks and no prerequisites about coding.
• Smart-Contract: Smart Contracts are a bunch of code deployed on the blockchain. As the popular saying goes — anything that goes on the blockchain, stays on the blockchain. They guarantee a fund-release if and when the gig is completed, or a refund to client in case the gig isn’t completed.
• Escrow system: An Escrow is a legal entity that acts like a judge between the two parties. Is the escrow reliable? When they’re humans - maybe not. But when they’re pieces of code - 100%.

"In the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you” - Balaji Srinivasan

A web3 collateralization mechanism wherein the trust is further enforced using a staking system, both freelancers and clients have the option to stake their token/money, to gain a competitive advantage at the risk of losing the staked amount in case of defaulting on payments or project delivery respectively.

Stand for Multi-Signature. It makes it possible to ensure the consent and agreement of two parties on different sides of the transactions. Each detail of the smart contract is mutually agreed upon using multi-sig, wherein both parties have to sign using their public IDs, with a click of a button.

DAO, despite their very decent introduction to the web3 ecosystem, they are slowly making their way up proving the power and potential communities possess. We hope to leverage this power of DAOs to create an efficient and adaptive listing system.

Why get paid when the whole work’s done? Some gigs could go on for months. This is where milestones can help. Parties can mutually decide milestones (or stages of work). This ensures continuous payment to the freelancer and a proper estimate of the latter’s quality to the client.

We hope to scale down, both the time and the involved complexity of making an agreement contract, one shouldn’t have to spend the time when programs can simply the whole process multiple times.

A common problem among freelancers is the non-certification model of the current gig economy. Freelancers don’t have any proof for their work (compare it with internships). RevereLabs introduces NFT badging for reviews received from clients, which are un-fakable, blockchain-secured tokens of recognition of their work.

1. Non-Transferable → We restrict the transferability of NFTs for the essence we want to cultivate is how one must actually earn one themselves. One feature of World of Warcraft that is second nature to its players, but goes mostly undiscussed outside of gaming circles, is the concept of soulbound items. A soulbound item, once picked up, cannot be transferred or sold to another player. Such would be our NFTs, to ensure their true validity and value is maintained.
2. Upgradability → NFTs are designed in a unique upgradable fashion, where the upgradability generally might either reflect the milestones or %age progressed in the gig. This makes the NFTs much more flexible and comprehensive into something that might actually posses utility from a profiling point of view.

The proposed service is, for sure, extremely beneficial to the freelancer as the staked amount provides security for their work. To cater to the client’s needs, it’s been one of our prime areas of concern to ensure that the client doesn’t end up being the one who is duped. To ensure the same, prior to the client staking their money share, we add a layer prior to it, considering that money is something a lot of freelancers might not have; they have to thus, complete a sample (exact percent can be mutually decided) of the task to showcase their interest and future commitment, similar to how Requests for Proposals (RFP) work. After the successful completion of the same, the client is then required to stake the milestone-based amount necessary for the work to resume, and thus the project unfolds like a cradle between the freelancer and client, respectively doing the job and ensuring timely payment to ensure no biases are created, and trust is provided at each step taken.

The introduction of blockchain technology opens the doors for revenue generation via tokenomics too. The main revenue scheme revolves around the following three pillars:

→ 1-4% Commission per transaction cost taken equally from freelancer and client.

→ 0% fee for the transaction using native token, hence appreciating the value of the token

→ Money lending in case of inability of the client to stake money.

• Our front end is finalized at : http://www.reverelabs.org/
• Our final Figma Prototype : https://www.figma.com/file/x3j8BZqDnYzQsgFObKJb7j/revere-Labs?node-id=377%3A4220
• Our first Working MVP is currently being developed and would be released on 22nd Aug!

To ensure that we are in touch with ground realities, we made it one of our primary tasks to ensure to talk to as many freelancers and clients as possible to be able to dive into the root of the existing systems. We are also talking to a lot of chains to get the idea built with collaboration and been attending a lot of Web3 Meetups. For the most part, we noticed a need for such a no-code smart-contract-based escrow system which helped us validate our idea, and constructive criticism which helped us polish the areas where we lack.💪

We recently started our Alpha Testing Discord which we soon hope to transform into a full-fledged community : https://discord.gg/w8tW5sASd4

Check out our twitter for regular updates and collborations: https://twitter.com/RevereLabs

We have in-detailed analyzed the existing competition with aim of getting deeper insights into how the market functions with respect to such mechanisms. There have been numerous similar products, neither of which has developed into a mature end-product. Having competitors all around the world, was further validation for us to understand the need we identified was real, and we are taking specific care to avoid the mistakes and flaws we notice in already existing products.

We believe that our processes and our willingness to take things one step further would help us achieve our goals.👌

Immediate Competitors

• Vault-X :
  • Payments only in Sol
  • No metamask support in escrow, they have: Phantom, Slope, Solflare, Torus, Ledger, Sollet Sollet (Extension).
  • No Freelancer NFT multisig-validation - Validation of skills of the freelancer using even possible third-party multi-sig.
• Escaroo:
  • Bitcoin-based no-code escrow
  • Zero options for listing/validation
  • Very simple to use but lacks important features that might be beneficial such as even milestones, made for a generalized online transaction case and not freelance
• ADEed
  • Transaction only in ADA (Native token)
  • No proper staking mechanism for the freelancer
  • No listing features, only tackle conflict resolution and escrow
  • No freelancer skill- validation feature.
• Inshaan:
  • Ineffective UX and userflow of escrow
  • Decent Lisiting, similar to Upwork / Fiverr
  • Inadequate measures for skill validation.
  • Seems to have an improper utilization of what web3 can offer, such as tokenization and NFTs.

Long term Competitors

• upWork / Fiverr / Freelancer:
  • Major web2 existing incumbents.
  • Extremely high commission fee, upto 20-25%
  • Either freelancer of Client have their power taken
  • No solid method of verification of skills of freelancers which is done by us using multi-signed NFTs
  • No transparency which is given using the power of customizable smart-contracts
• Smartlink:
  • Focusing on building a complete marketplace, thus seems to lack intricate features such as equal staking between freelancer and client which is facilitated by our Cradle Model
  • Despite having a NFT incorporation, they seem to lack features that we provide such as Non Transferable NFT profiling.
• Kleros
  • Decentralized - Courts
  • Take the opposite approach from us, with “validation” and “conflict resolution” being the central core of their idea and escrow being a small side-feature, while we target an effective escrow first, and then would leverage the network effort for conflict resolution.
• TrustSwap
  • Escrow services but for exchange of crypto-assets
  • Similar to Uniswap.

For further Contacts:

Abhay Chowdhry

Heemank Verma

Vishnu Shon

RevereLabs