HYVE is a community-governed ecosystem that solves the current problems in the global multi billion freelance and workforce market, leveraging the power of decentralized technologies while adding new features and mechanics that are non-existent on any current platform.
Q: Today I want to give a warm welcome to @bradyasar and @tstomff from HYVE!
B: Thank you for having us over.
Q: No problem Im glad you could make it! Could you please introduce yourself to everyone here?
B: My name is Brad Yasar and Ilove building stuff that helps others. I have been an entrepreneur for almost 35 years now. I have been in crypto since 2009 starting with Bitcoin. Met Tudor Stomff many years back and we started working on crypto projects, helping them grow and build audiences. Then the idea of creating a DAO for freelancers the largest group of the workforce and growing came about and we started working on HYVE.
Q: That’s a great amount of experience and it really goes to show through the work you have put into HYVE so far. Could you go into a little more detail on your background related to crypto?
B: Yes, i started by mining Bitcoin in early day when it had no value. Got interested in Litecoin, Mastercoin to name a few early ones. Made some life long friends. Then, when Ethereum was announced, got super excited, because now I could create business cases (other than trading, mining, wallets, etc). Participated in ETH ICO then saw a tidal wave of new projects coming and refocused my advisory firm to crypto-only projects. I am a technologist by passion and a financier/banker by training so the whole 16/17 ICO boom was a great time.
Tudor started Bountyhive and we started working on community development for new crypto projects and that grew into HYVE as we know it today. I am an active investor in the space, have invested in over 150 crypto assets. I still actively mine and trade crypto as a passion.
Q: Yeah I personally was never around for the 16/17 ICO craze but from what I heard it was crazy haha. Glad to see you have this type of experience behind you. Now earlier you mentioned HYVE being a DAO for freelancers. Could you explain to everyone here what HYVE is all about?
B: Yes, throughout our work on helping other crypto businesses launch and grow, we got to work we some very talented people across the globe. Freelancer who were great at what they do but with very few avenues to find work. To make their lives even more complicated, they also had to deal with high fees on the platforms were they could look for work and experience delays after they successfully finished the task at hand because of the processors and the middleman that had to be involved with the traditional platforms.
So we decided to use distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrencies to make life better for them and HYVE was born. HYVE is an autonomous jobs platform that is faster, more reliable with smaller fees and instant settlement times than its traditional counterparts. Add the treasury functionality and defi centric approach as well as the possibility of seamless machine human collaboration and you have our vision for HYVE.
T: Hey everyone, glad to be here as well, and really sorry for being late. To add on everything Brad said, we’re making all of this incredibly easy to use. We know a lot of dApps had problems with user adoption and we’re making HYVE behave like a normal app but built on blockchain technology.
To give the simplest example, when you want to pay someone on HYVE you just put their name in, like I select Brad and send him 10$, not his public address. HYVE takes care of that. After all, when you use a card to pay at a POS you don’t need to know how it works and blockchain should follow that principle which is how we’re building HYVE. We’re also opening pre-registrations in just a bit over a month from now
Q: I can’t wait to get in on this when it opens! How would you say you differ from your competitors?
B: Well, we have minimal to no fees, facilitate instant settlements and allow the community to monitor itself so we are fully decentralized and community driven as opposed to centralized and profit driven. All the value created by the platform is designed to be captured by our stakeholders.
T: There’s many differences to be honest but I’ll try to keep it short.
- HYVE is open. Others can build on HYVE. i.e. people can add dapps on top of HYVE OR Upwork can decide to build their own decentralized version on our infrastructure;
- 100% of fee revenue goes to token holders through some different mechanisms;
- we allow humans & robots to work together + self-verifiable tasks.
And all the small things like having recruiters, decentralized curation & disputes, etc. Also every feature is built on game theoretical principles, and we have HYVEs which are basically decentralized startups for people from around the world to work together.
Q: Would you be able to go into more detail on that?
T: Sure. The entire system is built from the ground up to align the incentives of the user with those of the platform on one hand and to make the users take the correct decision on the other hand. I’ll explain each one with a different example.
First one, the system itself. Fee revenue goes 50% to staking (in the future, they will also support the platform itself through nodes etc) and 50% to the Vault.
The Vault is an auction house where every individual fee is auctioned. The 2nd highest bidder wins and bids are anonymous. Bids can only be made in HYVE.
The HYVE users pay in the Vault is the actual revenue of the platform. 50% is burned and 50% goes to a community governed treasury which is used to reward proposals made by users.
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1. Because users have a direct benefit from HYVE growing, they will spend time on it.
2. If too many users are staking, the vault has good offers, and vice-versa. If both are overused, then circulation of overall tokens drops a lot. Then people will sell, it rebalances, back from 0.
Then for the second one, individual actions. Feedback. Here’s how it works in HYVE. Grades go from 1 to 5. If you receive grades 1 to 3 they show up on your profile automatically, but if it’s a 4 or a 5 it only shows up after you also leave a review in return. Incentivizing leaving reviews.
If a review is fraudulent, you can contest it in a decentralized court through Kleros which is built into HYVE and then the one who left it will have a permanent mark on his record for doing this. And this is for pretty much every feature inside HYVE, incentives / disincentives for every action.
Q: This is the info I was looking for thank you for answering the question so thoroughly. Now you talked about a decentralized court. Could you explain how the DAO works in this sense? If someone makes a dispute, what happens?
T: Sure, I mean you can open a dispute for anything but you have to provide evidence which goes directly to the jurors that each cast an individual vote, unbeknown to the other jurors, after their internal deliberations of course.
After the vote, a decision is taken. Court decisions can also be contested but each succesive one costs more to disincentivize bad actors.
As for the DAO itself. Users can make proposals to change / add features to HYVE. Then people vote. If they get accepted other users can participate in building said feature and get a reward from the Treasury.
In time the idea of HYVE is to become fully autonomous and need no “founder” or “team” input whatsoever. An ever-changing community coupled with its various automations should enable full autonomy, irregardless of any external factors.
B: We ae expecting to have all types of skill sets represented on the platform from highly technical to highly creative so the community will be able to improve HYVE on its own.
T: Also they get rewards for it so it’s not pro-bono work. Obv this will take a few years to achieve, but HYVE does have a pretty high degree of autonomy from the first iteration anyway.
Q: There really is a multitude of benefits to switch over to the the HYVE platform just from reading all of this. In terms of being fully decentralized, you are the first to do this right?
B: To the best of my knowledge, yes.
T: And in this form, yes. There are parts of it spread out throughout different apps. For example we allow people to sign P2P blockchain verified contracts. But there’s a whole niche of companies doing this. The thing is we needed these features so we can offer people a good infrastructure to build on, so that’s why some of the things we’ve rebuilt altogether. Like the encryption we use. It’s a combination of synchronous and asynchronous because we had to solve a specific edge case (it’s in the WP). So there are parts of it out there, yes, absolutely.
But no one that has built something that can be truly called an open and generalistic protocol. In other words, there isn’t really any technical limitation in terms of the types of collaboration you can have. The only limitations will come from people. We allow 9 to 5 jobs, offers like on Fiverr, competitions, open or closed entry events, goal based tasks, etc.
Q: Makes perfect sense, and hopefully it gives you guys the first mover advantage in this space. The possibilites seem pretty much endless with you guys in terms of freelancing. I recall Brad mentioning reduce costs to all parties, how is that done? Also, other than reducing costs, what are the advantages of a decentralized version of the freelance and workforce market?
B: Well, by having a programmatic and decentralized business model we are reducing a large chuck of overhead for the business. And since we are a DAO and community driven, we can keep our fees low and with the use of blockchain eliminate all the middlemen bloating the fee structure.
T: Sure, to be honest we went a bit crazy with that, it’s one of the things that resulted in us working for 2 years before we even made this public.
- fees for tasks are between 0% and 1%. 1% for tasks paid in ETH and such, 0.5% if you pay the fee in HYVE and 0 if you pay the entire task in HYVE, incentivizing people to build and add their own fees on top for sustainability. Also if it’s 0, holders still make money because the HYVE has to be bought from somewhere
- reducing costs. Well first off, all of our contracts, or maybe not really all but like 90% of them are built with inline assembly meaning we handle all the mathematical operations with assembly and only store the final value in solidity because math operations cost gas on ETH. This reduces gas costs and also executes the contracts faster.
- in addition to that, the interfacing of the platform itself is also built in such a way so that you don’t have to wait an eon for each click, this is a bit longer though and I’m not aware of anyone else doing it so I’d like to maintain it as is until release of code.
Also, you can be an HR agent on HYVE for eg, you can make a company with 3 people from around the globe and make money together without having to pass through all the normal problems that come along with it. Basically HYVE will behave exactly like Upwork or any other centralized version in terms of speed etc but it will work on blockchain completely. The cool thing about is that collaboration really sits at the base of our society, it’s why we won as a species. So that’s why HYVE isn’t a nice to have but a necessity.
Q: Really is huge for you guys, and with the work I’ve seen from your team I truly think you guys can own this market. This is a really important question. People can be attracted to HYVE because of these features that you and Brad have talked about. But, in reality verifying jobs and service authenticity could be a pain in the global workforce market. How does HYVE deal with this issue to make sure jobs on the platform are legitimate?
T: Ok so I’m going to have to plug again: https://hyveworks.medium.com/introducing-hyve-protocol-47c4a3902b4e
But in short. Every type of task that can be objectively measured, i.e. distance, time, digital actions so transportations, sign-ups etc all of this becomes self-verifiable
B: In short a peer rating system will eliminate illegitimate users.
T: As in there is no human involved in verifying the completion of said task. The protocol does that. It’s the only HYVE component that won’t be open source as well. And yes, people curate bad tasks, you can report them just like opening a dispute, someone judges the claim and the task is taken down.
Curators get paid for their work, and anyone can be a curator or have any number of HYVE roles concomitantly.
Q: Thank you love the answers you both gave. I noticed there are many ways to get paid on HYVE. For the people that don’t know, how can one make money on HYVE exactly?
T: Well first off you get some tokens just for signing up so you can use the platform but it’s a negligent amount as you can imagine.
You can be a staker or hunt deals in the vault, you can be a curator or a freelancer, you can be an HR agent or a HYVE member, you can build out proposals and get paid out from the treasury or you could simply be a holder and spread the word about HYVE.
B: Pretty much any positive interaction with the platform makes you money.
T: Or you can go to the next level and build something on top, I forgot about that.
B: Because you are the platform, you are a part of HYVE.
T: Yeah, I think that really encapsulates the essence of it. We should probably use that.
Q: Really great explanation thank you. Now I also wanted to ask, is HYVE partnered with any other project? If so, how does this benefit the vision of HYVE?
T: Yes. With Kleros, Pundi X and Bit2Big. We’re also working on a few other ones.
Kleros helps with decentralized disputes. With Pundi we have a co-branded card where users can cash out their earnings and use it to pay. And with Bit2Big they’re helping us with Africa entrance. HYVE users from Africa can go an exchange crypto for their native fiat currency through bit2big, this is all in short of course.
Q: Great selection of partnerships, hopefully we can get more announcements of future ones later down the road :). You mentioned Bit2Big helping you enter in Africa. Utility and adoption are key factors for any growth. What’s being done behind the scenes to drive more global expansion behind the platform other than Bit2Big?
T: Well, it might seem counterintuitive but we plan to build HYVE out in a way that allows offline people to use it as well.
This will be accomplished through oracles and real-world people. That’s in relation to Africa and other countries with poor adoption of tech.
For countries with tech adoption, a good enough product speaks for itself, but we will obviously also have a marketing plan in tandem, though that’s a bit of a longer topic.
Q: Sounds good thank you. Now for my last question before I open it up to the floor. What can we expect from the team in the coming days, weeks, and months in terms of development and marketing?
T: Pre-registrations start on 25th Jan and we’re releasing the product in the first quarter of 2021. We give our monthly updates around the 25th of each month.
Q: Awesome I’m really excited to see what you guys have planned ahead. Feel free to give us an update in here whenever you have the chance!
T: Sure, will gladly do so.
Q: I want to thank @tstomff and @bradyasar for joining us today for this AMA. If any of you have questions feel free to ask when the chat is open!
