To truly obtain freedom, we need to have #sovereignty; ultimate and un-confiscatable authority over our lives. The ability to make decisions for ourselves, free of coercion.

In the realm of work, sovereignty translates into having complete control over how you make income, to the extent that your earning ability is resilient amidst outside forces.

Work sovereignty is made possible when your #reputation, built over time, is trusted by enough people to make finding new work easy.

Your ease of finding new work is a matter of…

1. Your perceived reputation, based on data available and it’s quality

2. Who can access your reputation data and what they can do with it

Without work sovereignty, the ability to acquire new work whenever you please can be taken away from you by nation-states, employers, and job platforms. They may revoke work permits, terminate your employment, or even ban you from accessing certain platforms that help you find new partners.

Unfortunately, most people today do not experience work sovereignty. This is due to some big design flaws in how we collaborate today.

It's a problem of how we’ve scaled work globally.

Reputation is hard to scale. It always has been.

In the past, the people that we could work with were limited to our personal network: the people that we knew directly, and their respective networks, as long as they were willing to vouch for our reputation.

What is reputation? Reputation is the cumulation of data on an individual, as interpreted by others. It can include information like work history, reviews, education history, transaction history, and a virtually endless set of other data points. It is inherently subjective based on context and circumstance. It is ever-changing as new data is added.

So far, it's only been possible to scale beyond these brain-powered reputation networks through "trusted" intermediaries.

Hiring networks, freelance marketplaces, ride-share apps, babysitting platforms, food delivery platforms and an endless number of other work platforms are the middlemen of our era.

Today, trusted intermediaries provide us with three key services:

+ act as a guarantor of our reputation

+ connect us with people beyond our network

+ facilitate and secure payments

These third parties helped us scale work, but they came at a cost.

These platforms put our reputations at risk.

Due to the #centralized nature of these intermediaries, a person’s ability to earn is always at risk. Our reputation, our access to work, and our income have been put in someone else’s hands, and can be taken away at any time.

All Russian citizens were blanket banned from the popular freelance platform Upwork in 2022. They woke up finding their contracts abruptly ended and their reputations pending deletion.

In Canada in 2022 we saw that in less than 24 hours thousands of individuals who donated a few dollars to truck drivers can have their permit to work revoked, lose access to their bank account, and be cut off on major communication platforms.

These platforms also fragmented our reputations.

No one has a clear picture of who we are and what we’ve done. This is because most workers and hirers can’t find enough people to work with on one platform alone, they are forced to make accounts on many.

Have you ever seen a driver switching from Uber to Lyft to find more rides? Or a freelancer using 3-4 platforms to find enough work? “Multi-homing” is a well-known phenomenon on hiring platforms, caused by people not finding sufficient partners on one platform.

With each new account users create, they start their reputation from scratch; oftentimes having to lower their rates in order to get their first work. People’s work opportunities are limited by the accessibility of their reputations.

Why does the world work like this?

Why are we relying on these intermediaries that hold so much control on us?

It’s not a global conspiracy. Relying on middlemen was actually the best option that we had to scale human coordination.

They were the most efficient way for people to find each other, facilitate payments and scale our reputation, even at the cost of renouncing to our control over it.

It’s not an issue of these middlemen themselves. It was an issue of technology.

We didn’t have the right tools.

Today we do.

There is a better way.

In order to achieve scaleable work relationships without sacrificing user sovereignty, we need a very different kind of system; one that exists at a lower level than today’s platforms. Blockchain technology represents a leap forward in enabling trust, financial transactions, and data distribution in a peer-to-peer and verifiable way. It serves as the perfect foundation to build a new way of working from the ground up; grounded by principles.

User-owned data

We need a system where users own and control the work data that they generate (and therefore, their reputations).

Open data ecosystems

We need a system where data and the infrastructure that produces it are extendable by third-party applications to create new services for users.

Lower-level networks

We need a system where networks of users live behind platform interfaces; enabling discovery and transactions between parties in an interface-agnostic way.

But how can we build this?

The Past:

🟡 Reputations](https://emojipedia.org/large-yellow-circle/)Reputations) are sovereign but not scaleable

🟡 We](https://emojipedia.org/large-yellow-circle/)We) use brain-powered networks

The Present:

🔴](https://emojipedia.org/large-red-circle/)) Reputations are scaleable but not sovereign

🔴](https://emojipedia.org/large-red-circle/)) We use platform-enabled networks

The Future:

🟢](https://emojipedia.org/large-green-circle)) Reputations are both scaleable and sovereign

🟢](https://emojipedia.org/large-green-circle)) We use blockchain-based networks

Today, it’s possible for a global coordination layer for work to exist; replacing the role of middleman in discovery, payment, and trust, while empowering the next generation of applications to be built.

It’s not just possible; it’s inevitable.

We’ve been building this layer for one year; powered by an ecosystem of open-source developers who have lived the problems with work today, and are motivated to fix it. This week is the one-year anniversary since our first line of code was shipped at the #ETHCC hackathon in #Paris.

We’ve traveled the world to share our message and grow our movement thanks to donors who believe in our mission.

We’ve helped the first platforms go live, and on them, the first people have found work.

Now, we’re bringing this new way of work to the masses.

This is TalentLayer.

We are building something different.

We’re building something that will fundamentally change how every human on earth connects with one another.

We’re building a new way of working.