How does the decentralized talent network Braintrust operate?

Source: Coinlist Blog

Compiled by: Dong Yiming, Chain Catcher

Braintrust is the first decentralized talent network that connects highly skilled freelancers with some of the world's most renowned brands, aligning the interests of talent and companies.

Recently, Coinlist and the Braintrust team discussed the content, use cases, and ideas for Web 3.0 that the project is building. Below is the compilation by Chain Catcher:

1. What is Braintrust, and what problem does it solve?

Braintrust is the first decentralized talent network that connects highly skilled technical freelancers with some of the world's most renowned brands, such as Nestlé, Porsche, Atlassian, Goldman Sachs, and Nike. Braintrust's unique business model allows talent to retain 100% of their earnings and enables companies to flexibly assemble the teams they need at a lower cost. This new business model, which limits fee extraction and allows for community ownership, can only be enabled by blockchain tokens.

Since emerging from stealth mode in June 2020, Braintrust's cumulative service value has grown from $3.5 million in 2020 to $31 million in 2021, averaging over 34% monthly growth. Braintrust's community has expanded its usage, adoption, and talent earnings, with the talent community growing by 215% and individual talent rates approaching $100 per hour (with no fees deducted from these earnings).

2. Is your market particularly focused on certain industries?

Braintrust's talent community primarily focuses on large, complex technology and design projects that span software design, machine learning, data analysis, and related functions. Examples may include creating a health insurance shopping platform for a large insurance company or equipping a transportation company with five full-stack engineers.

Braintrust attracts top technical talent from companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, currently focusing on four core categories involved in agile software development and IT, which include:

• Designers (Graphic + UI/UX)
• Engineers/Architects
• Product and Project Managers
• Quality Assurance

Currently, about 50% of Braintrust's talent is located in the United States, with the other 50% spread across over 100 different countries worldwide.

3. With many markets for global talent, why use blockchain? Why is decentralization important?

What sets Braintrust apart is its model: its marketplace is decentralized and user-controlled. Other platforms like Toptal, Upwork, and Gigster take 20-40% from talent earnings, with ownership highly concentrated among a few individuals and investors. Braintrust does not take any fees from talent earnings, and it is governed by its token-holding community. This approach allows Braintrust to attract and retain higher-quality talent.

Blockchain technology enables Braintrust to eliminate intermediaries and maintain aligned incentives. This significantly reduces costs for clients and increases their earnings by eliminating high fee extractions, thus attracting the world's top talent, who can retain 100% of their earnings on the Braintrust platform.

Braintrust's blockchain-driven model aligns the incentives of the network itself with those who build it. This is achieved by rewarding control and ownership with BTRST tokens based on contributions to the network. The tokens power the governance of the entire decentralized network, incentivizing the community to collaboratively build the network by referring clients and inviting new talent for review.

BTRST has a fixed supply of 250 million tokens, meaning the total number of tokens in circulation will never exceed this amount. This blockchain approach stands in stark contrast to Web 2.0, where centralized platforms extract high fees from knowledge workers' earnings.

This not only gives the community more control but also has the potential to help the network grow rapidly.

4. What is your acquisition strategy for top talent? How do you incentivize them to refer other qualified candidates?

Braintrust's user ownership structure enables a powerful talent acquisition model built on BTRST, which can reduce talent acquisition costs to nearly zero while rapidly expanding demand. Today, nearly 50% of Braintrust's new clients and talent are driven by the BTRST token referral program. These referral programs are called Connectors. Anyone can sign up, receive a unique code, and start adding their network to Braintrust.

When users introduced by Connectors start transacting, the Braintrust network pays them rewards based on a percentage of their transaction volume or the total Gross Service Value (GSV) generated. Connectors earn tokens for each successfully paid invoice, providing them with more network ownership to help drive the network's value and talent count.

The combination of platform growth and community growth illustrates how Braintrust's unique tokenization model aligns freelancer incentives with the market itself.

5. What brands are hiring on Braintrust? What have you learned from those early adopters?

Braintrust's high-skilled, vetted talent attracts businesses and organizations across various sectors. Since June 2020, Braintrust's client community includes Pacific Life and Nestlé, and Stanley Black & Decker has more than tripled in scale, with the average project size growing to $57,000, and some even reaching $300,000. In addition to project size, job postings on the platform increased more than threefold in 2021.

6. Traditional markets charge users fees; how does Braintrust make money?

Braintrust charges clients (employers) a fixed fee of 10%. Braintrust is a "public benefit" rather than a profit-driven organization, with the goal of fulfilling its mission to create a decentralized talent marketplace and make its network beneficial for all.

7. What are the main use cases for the native token BTRST?

BTRST tokens have multiple uses, including:

• Governance: BTRST token holders can discuss ideas for platform improvements, propose changes, and vote on governance proposals. Since each token represents one vote, users with more tokens have a greater say in the network's development.
• Staking for bidding rights: In a competitive market, talent may stand out by staking tokens as collateral; if they fail to fulfill a contract (based on community adjudication), they will lose their collateral. Clients can also stake tokens, which will be allocated to qualified applicants if they do not continue working, encouraging talent to apply as they know their time spent crafting proposals will be compensated. Token bidding helps to "eliminate" or reduce friction in the market, maintaining greater transparency by addressing supply-demand mismatches.
• Career benefits: These tokens are also expected to be redeemable for special benefits provided by other community participants specifically for the Braintrust community, including free and discounted software, products, and career resources. Users can also earn tokens by participating in courses at Braintrust Academy, a community-run organization that teaches talent valuable skills to help them earn more on the network.

Note: BTRST tokens do not represent equity, debt, profit entitlement, or dividends, nor do they constitute any financial instrument of any enterprise or organization.

8. What crypto trends are you most interested in over the next six months?

Over the past 20 years, there have been many significant technological transformations that have reset the tech landscape, whether through the rise of mobile computing or cloud computing. New tech giants have changed the way we use technology in our daily lives and have essentially monopolized the innovation market.

Web 3.0 is one of these major structural changes, and we are beginning to see it move beyond the experimental phase into very real and practical use cases. Due to the decentralized nature of this specific new model, these new use cases are being adopted and utilized at an unprecedented rate. This is because Web 3.0 is not about gathering large organizations with tens of thousands of employees; rather, it is driven by a multitude of contributors and beneficiaries.

In this way, two trends are effectively merging to create incredibly powerful capabilities. First is the continued maturation and openness of Web 3.0 technology, allowing anyone the opportunity to build cool and useful things. Second is the growing understanding among enough people that the old way—centralized entities issuing commands and setting rules—does not benefit them as users.

This rise of the ownership economy and Web 3.0 will jointly trigger some very cool projects that will bring more and more people into the crypto world. People will not just be curious onlookers or speculators but will use these protocols and tools that can improve their lives.