A decentralized platform is rebuilding the way freelancers find work

By 2027, more than half of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers.

That means that 86.5 million Americans will be part of the gig economy at least part time, according to a recent study by Statista. That’s up from 67.6 million this year, and the pandemic has only accelerated this trend, as a recent study of the $1.2 trillion industry showed 12% of the U.S. workforce tried freelance work for the first time in the past 12 months. 

And all of those decentralized workers will need to find and work with clients, which is where HYVE comes in.

A decentralized platform designed to cut intermediaries out of the freelance and workforce industry, HYVE isn’t planning to fix the business, which it says is broken. 

“We’re not touching that with a 10-foot pole,” the company says. “We’re building it from scratch.”

A community-governed ecosystem, HYVE wants to bring the power of the decentralized blockchain technology to every part of the gig economy. That means connecting workers with people and companies that want to hire them is just the first step. It also plans to bring smart contracts and decentralized governance into the core of the task development, contracting, and the payment process.

Decentralizing gigs

A core part of ’HYVE’s strategic plan is to break through what it sees as the major problems centralized workforce and gig platforms suffer from — a “rigid model” that tries to force hirers to conform their tasks and jobs to fit the site’s design or spread their work among multiple platforms. Complexity aside, that means both providers and employers must lose the benefits of building a reputation on one site. 

Hyde’s model is to categorize tasks and jobs according to how they are judged, approved and verified rather than the nature of the task itself. This uses a four-part model, beginning with how the task is verified — by human judgement or a smart contract-triggering protocol — then whether its visible to everyone, when payment is made, and if providers must be pre-selected.

Another aspect of the platform is encouraging providers to form self-governed teams, called “hyves” of course, that can jointly apply for and collaborate on tasks. At the same time, there is also a provision for “agents” — essentially middlemen connecting employers and workers — and 9-to-5 hiring, a dispute resolution system, and a robust feedback mechanism to build reputation (good or bad). Data storage and privacy are maintained by the use of IPFS, the storage system of the decentralized Web 3.0 protocol.

Along with a highly adaptable back-end and user-friendly front-end, the HYVE Core is an collection of public and verifiable smart contracts that can be added to freely. HYVE’s mainnet launch is scheduled for the third quarter of 2021.

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Like any decentralized platform, the core of HYVE’s governance model is a token — HYVE, an ERC-777 token backwards-compatible with Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard.

To begin with, the job-listing fee favors HYVE. Fiat is full price, ether or any ERC-20 token is half price, HYVE is one quarter, and a job both listed and paid in HYVE is free.

HYVE is also a governance token, with staking required to propose or vote on changes. Stakers can also get a percentage of non-fiat fees, which are split 50-50 between the staking contract and a community rewards vault. 

On May 21, HYVE was listed by KuCoin, a major cryptocurrency exchange that currently has the sixth-highest Exchange Score on CoinMarketCap, as well as a 24-hour trade volume of more than $2.8 billion.

“We are extremely proud to announce the partnership with KuCoin, as it is a milestone in our business development and very much necessary in order to offer our community a trustworthy environment for trading,” said HYVE CEO Tudor Stomff.