Have you ever felt the need to hire a freelancer? Ok, let us start with the definition of freelancing. Freelancers are the people with a particular skill set available to be hired for part-time jobs remotely or locally. The freelancers are self-employed and do not have any long-term commitments for the work with the employer.
The freelancing market is booming and is estimated sales per year are in trillions of dollars, yes, can you believe it? As per a Forbes report- Freelancers make up 35% of U.S. workers and collectively earned $1 trillion in the past year, according to the “Freelancing in America: 2016” survey released this morning by the Freelancers Union, based in New York City, and the giant freelancing platform Upwork, headquartered in Silicon Valley. The Freelancers Union represents 300,000 members.
This is huge and so are some of the popular websites hosting the business of freelancing. Currently, there are so many online websites facilitating the employer freelancer interaction where they meet and discuss project requirements and start working and obviously pay a percent of the project cost as a fee to the interface platform such as freelancer.com, Upwork etc.
The commission goes from somewhere around 10-25% of the project amount. Yes, the commission amount is quite high for the facilities offered and often these results in an even higher unfair possession of the money by the mediating platform which remains unclaimed. Ever thought of anything that can replace this model? Yes, we all do and think of hiring people randomly but that comes at a risk because of unregulated environment freelancers do not feel the urge to deliver the projects within the time limit of the acceptable quality. This makes things difficult for both parties and also often one of the sides who put his trust first into the other feels cheated.
Well, now with the solution in the form a peer to peer freelancing system such as Ethearnal. This system is based on the crypto technologies and Blockchain where the systems run through itself without any intervention of a mediator resulting in negligible commissions for the project, benefitting both the employer and the freelancers. They have a technology-enabled system where the tokens are your reputation for the profile and the more token you have the higher are the chances of getting a good employer project or a good freelancer opting for your posted project. So the trust is maintained through tokens.
99% of the project amount is put into the escrow and the freelancer and the employer go into a smart contract while the remaining 1% is charged is 0.5% each from the two parties to avoid flooding of junk projects. The 99% of the amount put in escrow goes to the freelancer upon project completion while 0.5% is given back to each party as encashable ERT tokens used as profile reputation. So, if you sell them, your profile reputation is reduced by that much.
Systems like these have full proof features to eliminate middlemen from the freelancing world and is sure to make the place more beneficial and trustworthy for both parties as codes are not biased for anyone.