Work Network

Inspiration

Citizens of Myanmar currently do not have permission to access a large proportion of their money in local banks. We can only withdraw an equivalent of USD$170 monthly. Before the military coup, 70% chose to remain unbanked.

We are restricted from getting accounts in international banks and cannot pass KYC on CEX’s. In order to store their wealth, they can only hold a fast depreciating local currency, or purchase physical assets, in a market where demand far outstrips supply. All their options do a poor job at protecting their wealth, let alone grow it,   Web3 is a solution with things like self-custody wallets, BTC, stable coins and Anchor protocol.

Unfortunately barriers are high 

lack of trust in the intangible
non-existent fiat on and off ramps.
lack of promotion of the benefits
lack of education for managing the downsides/risks

Our team will leverage our traction in HR tech and frontier markets to create incentives for employers to pay workers in BTC or UST, give both access to a curated list of financial services, like Luna’s Anchor to earn 20% APY on their savings.

 We believe we can achieve this because we have already have a Web2 PWA App that provides a seamless experience from

Job Hunting (AI matching allowing up to 30minute job posting to working)
to getting paid (2,000 workers, USD$500,000 monthly)
to access to traditionally full time benefits like early earned wage access (3hr turnaround) and discounted insurance and product offerings
In community events, we already create content and people networks to support young worker’s upward mobility. We will extend this to include Web3 financial education, which we aim to remain at the forefront of.

But apart from the value for workers getting a cryptocurrency salary, we believe the data we have when providing our HR services has value. This hackAtom is an opportunity for us to investigate this further.

We believe the future of work is Permission-less & Interoperable. And Cosmos looks to provide us maximum flexibility in

protocol design  * interoperability
scalability

What it does

We implemented minting of NFT’s that represent CLAIMS on a sovereign chain

claim of letter of recommendation NFT - minted by employer, owned by worker.
claim of skill NFT - minted by third party verifier
claim of worked NFT - minted by employer, with worker checkin & checkout data, and owned by worker  * claim of paid NFT - minted by disbursement agent, sent to employer after fiat payment is done.

Uses of the claim NFT

Used as data within our web2 platform as part of the employer-worker relationship
Data is stored on IPFS, using the HR Open Standards 4.2 in JSON-LD format. This maximise chances the data will be useful in applications we do not foresee today.
One application we do foresee and we aim to offer are UNDER collateralised DeFi loans (not implemented). “claim of Worked NFT” as part of the risk assessment for workers. “Claim of paid NFT” as part of the risk assessment for employers
Blockchain allows us to AUDIT a claim. Audit will aim to be as close to free as possible, to the right level of rigour for an application

We had 3 parts to our vision.

We onboard our customers with cryptocurrency salary services (not part of hackAtom) 
Upgrade our existing services to also mint work claim NFT’s (hackAtom demo) 
Fungible Organisation Social tokens which get organizations into web3 marketing (not part of hackAtom)

The first part does not require a sovereign chain. The second part we implemented as we believe we can get traction with it with out team. And the last part is the primary reason why a sovereign chain is needed over the long term.

How we built it

Our aim was to mint NFT's, because we believe NFT's is a primitive of Web3, replacing all content. Social tokens will is also another primitive, along with DAO's, but we didn't have time to investigate them. Suffice to say, we believe a Work Network as we envision can only be built as a sovereign chain, and and it is in the best interest of all our customers (workers and employers) that these NFT's are highly interoperable.

So we just went ahead and used Starport. We looked at many repositories of other projects such as REGEN and Persistence. We leveraged the design thinking behind our current projects.

Challenges we ran into

Lack of standards. We wanted the best practice to mint interoperable NFT's. We started with interNFT, and found that Persistence's implemented was difficult to use with the latest Starport. Eventually we had to just move ahead and implement our own classes, with an eye to update them later when standards emerge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Minted several kinds of NFT's with data stored on IPFS. And even though we did not successfully integrate it with our existing services for demo, we have the experience now to know it can be done.

What we learned

Our old ways of building a business is outdated. We believe that the pillars of a project are technology, business development and community. These are done very different in Cosmos. There's still so many more factors to consider to make this project successful, but as least we have a much firmer grasp of the technology.

What's next for Work Network

We will definitely continue to integrate Web3 elements into our existing Web2 services. We know where the communities are if we need help. We know some of the other players, like Secret Network, who we can work with when we need privacy. We aim to be early, so we can work with future best projects who can have something valuable to offer our employer and worker clients.