OpenScore

Decentralized reputation for the freelance economy

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Inspiration

After the 2008 real estate crash I was left without a job and decided to try freelancing. I got my first account at a platform-based marketplace with sologig. After getting the first few jobs and very good ratings, the volume of jobs wasn't enough so I created an account with elance (currently upwork). Of course, I was brand new and didn't have any ratings, so it was awkward to say "My rating in sologig is 5 stars"... At some point I also was talking in person with potential clients, and was also having difficulties showing off my good scores online in a single place. That problem remained as a cloud over my head.

Fast forward to 2018 when I started getting involved with Ethereum, solidity, ERC20, etc. and I thought "this is perfect, ratings can be aggregated in a decentralized storage". Problem was I had just started writing smart contracts ...

Fast forward to 2020, I had a good idea on how to write smart contracts, use Infura, etc. etc. Problem was, Ethereum transactions were already too expensive!

Fast forward to 2022: I have decent web3 front end, backend and smart contract experience + this problem resurfaced in my brain + Polygon transactions are cheap and fast = OpenScore!

What it does

OpenScore enables freelancers to aggregate and take ownership of their online ratings via blockchain tokens. OpenScore allows users to turn their score from different web2 gig platforms into ERC20 tokens (non-transferrable / non-burnable) in the Polygon network. It's completely free for freelancers and clients to use (because Polygon transactions are very low cost!) and it's an easy way to get web2 users into the web3 world!

How I built it

The smart contracts are written in Solidity and deployed in Mumbai with truffle. The backend is Python with web3py and deployed in Google Cloud Functions. The database is a MySQL hosted in Google Cloud Platform. The front-end is Vue3 with Bootstrap5 and using Infura nodes to communicate with the blockchain, Metamask wallet, and hosted in Netlify CDN.

Challenges I ran into

Platform-based marketplaces are mostly pretty closed up (centralized) and don't provide APIs. I found challenging getting freelancers scores from them.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Building a proof of concept after work hours in 18 days!

What we learned

That developing web3 dApps in a hackathon is super fun!

What's next for OpenScore

  1. Launch public Beta!
  2. Integrate with more freelancer marketplaces (e.g. toptal, gigster, etc.). Support for other wallets, and option for custodial wallets
  3. NFT badges airdrop to freelancers with X tokens, they will allow other platforms to token-gate top freelancers
  4. Integrate with web3 freelance invoicing smart contracts (e.g. request.finance, gilded.finance, etc.) so when paying a freelancer, the client can optionally rate and automatically add the score to the freelancer OpenScore account
  5. Add more score categories: seller score (for physical items), credit scores for conventional lending and defi user behavior, gaming score.

Thank you for reading and considering this submission!

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