Ponder, Communities and the Blockchain
Tags: Blockchain, Recruiting, Partnerships, Community, Relationships

Manshu Agarwal, Ponder CEO

Given the distributed nature of the blockchain it makes sense that as a technology solution it meets many of the challenges posed by communities that to date have been built on less ideal platforms.

We have seen the evidence of this first hand at Ponder. Based on customer feedback for Ponder Social, we’ve seen that many people would prefer to interact within private communities that reflect their values, interests, or professions. Engineers might for example only be interested in referrals from other engineers, who have a better understanding of what types of roles they’d be best suited to. Similarly singles often want to be matched with people similar to them, whatever their ‘tribe’ might be — yogis in Miami, Mormons in San Diego etc.

The blockchain can address many of these needs by providing a referral and rewards structure that encourages the decentralized creation and ownership of these connections.

Sub Communities

Sub communities are a proven way to build a larger sustained community of users. Any user of Ponder Social can create their own sub-community, paying 1000 tokens (roughly $100) to do so. The owner of the sub-community sets the rules for who can enter the group, as well as the price of entrance for each new member. The owner can decide if they will be the only matchmaker within the community, or if other people can also play matchmaker. The owner also decides the cost of each successful match.

These rules are encoded into a Smart Contract on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing the owner to effectively create their own matchmaking business. Although the examples given have been for romantic matchmaking, sub-communities for recruiting and business partnerships follow similar principles.

By pushing ownership and management of these sub-communities down to individual owners, the costs of maintaining these communities are reduced. Ponder acts as a platform to allow these sub-communities to be set up, with its gamified UX and PON token, but with individual owners managing the community’s daily operations.

Transparency

Similarly, within referral sub-communities of Ponder Social, matchmakers are able to offer premium services to individual singles. These can be placed on to the blockchain to ensure transparency and accuracy.

This is especially important when tracking recruiting or business referrals. The blockchain provides transparency and accountability, not only to ensure proper referral rewards, but to create an open history that can be audited by any of the process stakeholders.

Identity

Users, whether singles, recruits or businesses can also verify aspects of their profiles using the Blockchain’s unique capabilities as a gatekeeper. For example, in certain cultures, income levels are a requisite part of someone’s dating profile. Similarly, in cases of job offers, a candidate’s educational qualifications can be verified. Civic’s SDK will be installed to ensure a base level of identity verification, with other services added as needed.

Data Security

One additional and often overlooked crucial aspect of using blockchain technology is the added security. As a technology platform provider we will hold some of the most personal and sensitive information about people — their job histories, dating profiles, and business information. Through using blockchain technologies we can have a distributed database, with consequently greater security against large-scale hacking.

Communities build value as they scale. There is no better way to scale communities and leverage sub communities while ensuring transparency, true identity and security than on the blockchain.

Learn more about the Ponder platform and token sale here!