The Future of Life, Work & Blockchain

2020 will be the year that changed the way we work forever. From the massive trend to work from home to the downsizing of all formal office space-oriented businesses, people think of work in a whole new way. 

The formerly fringe “gig economy,” regarded as more of a side hustle than a full-time occupation, has skyrocketed from a few freelancers to a powerful global economic trend. Edelman and Upwork estimated 57.3 million people worked as freelancers in 2017 and that most of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers by 2027 as that number hits 86.5 million. Moreover, this estimate was made before the lockdowns and work-from-home mandates globally in response to COVID-19 from mid-March 2020. This trend is continuing and even reinstating today in many parts of the world. 

The many advantages of being a self-employed gig worker include greater autonomy and schedule flexibility, the potential for an improved work/life balance, and greater options in general for types and quality of work. Finding the right gig for the right pay is also part of the gig. 

Most freelancers worldwide find work through a growing list of centrally controlled and operated online platforms requiring extensive staff with costs passed onto employers and gig workers themselves. These platforms’ disadvantages include high fees, slow settlements, data leaks, and an often limited reach. A decentralized platform using blockchain technology can offer solutions to these issues. 

As for fees, for example, two leaders in the freelancing space, Upwork and Fiverr, charge a 20% commission per job. Most freelancers’ payments are made with services like PayPal, which takes 2.9% in fees per transaction and an extra charge for transferring the money to

a bank account. Since payments require third-party intermediaries, settlements are also slow. Freelancers sometimes must wait weeks to withdraw earnings through a payment processor, and if for any reason a dispute arises, it can cause even longer delays.

With all personal data stored on a freelance platform’s centralized server, the possibility of a breach or leak is high. Today 1 in 4 people are victims of at least one data breach, making security a real issue.  

The real global freelance market reaches beyond borders, increasing the right people's chances to find the right jobs wherever they may be. However, today even the current market leader, Adecco, covers less than a third of the world’s countries.

Yet, there is hope for the new economy workers as platforms like HYVE are working to address these challenges.

HYVE.works is a blockchain-powered, decentralized community-governed ecosystem for solving problems in the global multi-billion-dollar/multi-billion human freelance and workforce market of today into the future. It leverages the power of decentralized technologies, with new features not available on legacy platforms. It is a community-governed system dramatically driving down costs for all parties. HYVE offers wider flexibility, cuts out the middleman, welcomes the unbanked, provides transparency, and ensures safety, all in a decentralized manner, rewarding its token holders.

Addressing fees, If an employer pays for a job in HYVE tokens, the cost is 0%. Paying in BTC, ETH, or other tokens is also possible, with a commission below the percentage of a single PayPal transaction. And through the HYVE.works permissive architecture, freelancers get paid as soon as a job is finished and approved, through smart contracts, with no complicated processes and no intermediary payment processors.

As for data breach and leaks, HYVE uses P2P encryption storage with all files and data on IPFS (Interplanetary File System) nodes, encrypted using asymmetric encryption -- never on a central server. And due to the distributed, shared nature of the blockchain, there is no single point of failure. This structure makes it more resilient than current systems. 

HYVE is an autonomous end-to-end workforce ecosystem. It functions as a full-fledged hiring agency, with agents continually looking to connect candidates and jobs. HYVE is a truly global agency, built with innovation to solve legacy issues and offer new options never before available to freelancers and hirers. 

We at Beyond Enterprizes see a bright future for HYVE as well as the new way of life and work that the future holds for us. For more information and updates, see hyve.works.