Decentralizing the Gig Economy with Grape
Tags: Decentralized, Solana Blockchain, Grape Protocol, Community Management, Gig Economy

Over the last decade, freelance work has grown exponentially. Connectivity is available around the world, and coordination tools have made it easier than ever to work with people in the remotest of regions. Covid forced most of the population to work from home; and everyone learned that most work can get done without going to the office.

Gig economy platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and 99designs have benefitted the most in this paradigm shift away from local work. Having a central place to find work and workers makes the process of executing on an idea frictionless in comparison to the old ways. Its just easier for both employers and for workers to set their own terms, their own work, and their own schedule.

But the experience is far from perfect. Employers have to sift through hundreds of submissions, endure fake accounts and portfolios that misrepresent quality, and more often than not, waste time with back and forth communication that always is missing one piece of information setting the project back another week.

For workers, its even worse. Employers are not vetted and will regularly take your work without pay. Some will even threaten to give you a lower rating if you don't do more work, even if it is above and outside the pre-arranged scope.

The Gig Economy platforms today fail at

Coordinating projects amongst 2 or more workers

Quality control of submissions

Handling communication issues

Protecting workers from giving work with no reward

Offering a fee structure that shares fair value with the workers

These platforms are supposed to fix those issues, and take a cut of the work from both participants. In the case of Upwork, they can take up to a whopping 20% from the entire transaction. However, if they aren’t solving those problems AND they are charging fees, that seems like a completely broken model. Users are forced to choose Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com because there were no alternatives…until today!

The new alternative is GrapeWork, a decentralized community collaboration marketplace. Instead of hiring one designer for that next logo you need, you can hire a team of designers, videographers, and branding experts that will work together to offer not 1, but 10+ options for you to choose from. This is only possible by having a “staking as a social activity” component created by the Grape Access protocol, our system that creates token-gated communities.

Grape Work solves the issues of today’s workforce platforms:

Projects are handled by a team including a project manager

Community feedback improves submissions

Project managers and translators remove communication issues

Escrow system ensures payment to workers no matter what

All fees collected go to the token ecosystem

By aligning everyone's incentives with a token, the community self-polices the participants, ensuring a higher quality product and experience. Tiered levels of contribution allow for every level of holder to get involved — small balances help review work where as large holders get to work directly on the submission.

When work is received, everyone in the community participates and benefits.

“Workers” are users with a specific skill that are holding 5000 grape. These skill roles belong to different salary pools — depending on the work requests and output every month, those salary pools adjust to match the contributions. This is coordinated along with the Grape DAO

We currently have

35 designers

19 videographers

7 writers

5 translators

5 event organizers

4 developers

3 streamers

“Reviewers” are members holding at least 1000 Grape and they vote on which submissions are worth showing to the employer, adding feedback where applicable . They benefit from giving good feedback, by making the workplace more competitive and increasing the value of the Grape economy.

Our first workplace event will be held as an auction

We’re launching this new workplace concept using Metaplex to start. You can find the auction here

https://nft.grapes.network/#/auction/3ndfyZUqyw5uFRtvV8K19r8jfDi5Kfnaps1WX8ov6MhW

This is our first ever season 1 work ticket, and is redeemable for any kind of video work.

Here are some examples of previous video work someone could ask for with this ticket

Video Promo Style

Video Tutorial Style

Video Animated Pixels

The winner shares their video work spec with our work teams. Teams create multiple draft videos that will be shared with the community to filter out the top 3 quality drafts.

Those 3 videos will go back to the employer (ticket holder) for more feedback and then the cycle begins again.

The final result gives 3 polished videos for the employer to choose as the final product.

More Flavors of Work Tickets

After this first sale, we will start selling tickets for work covering examples like:

A 30–60 second video in the style of a promotion or a tutorial

Design work for logos, fliers, and banner/social marketing materials

Animated Pixel Gifs

An AMA with Whale’s Friend

An article written by one of our writer’s

AMA’s with Whales Friend

Articles written by our writers

In the future, this concept will be one of our many community modules that other communities can use. Our vision is that communities will be able to setup their own workplace for their superfans, creating a bridge between the brand and it’s strongest supporters; enabling a loop of work and reward to seamlessly be created. Smart contracts will handle escrow and the feedback process with reviewers, while content will be hosted and served through arweave/ipfs.

Our philosophy of providing value today while preparing for the future of crypto-native coordination is best exemplified with this kind of experiment. The hardest part is in organizing a decentralized group and this proof of concept wouldn't be possible without the support of the amazing Grape community.

We’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved using this model and can’t wait to share our whitepaper, where we lay out all of our future modules.