With the way the internet has already found its way into most aspects of our day-to-day routines, it’s no surprise that is has become a central part of our lives. From entertainment and news to navigating around, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the role of staying connected, and blockchain is trying to retrace these steps while finding ways to disrupt the ways we interact with the internet.
The search for advice
One of the most overlooked roles of the internet, and probably the most useful, is the search for talent. Be it to answer a quick question, getting recipes, tutorials on how to fix electronics or just advice on choosing outfits, the internet gives everyone an opportunity to share their acquired knowledge and abilities for the world to learn from them and develop their own, with freelancing platforms having an edge in terms of connecting talents with potential employers or clients.
With blockchain’s massive rise to popularity, it should not be a surprise that it would eventually be implemented in the talent-search market, and that’s why Rami Schechter, after an extensive career in marketing and technology, decided to create Vanywhere.
A skill-sharing marketplace
Vanywhere aims to become a prominent platform where important names of certain markets (influencers, professional or self-taught experts) can offer their services to the audience, where these can make a reservation for a live video or voice call with the ‘Skiller’, for which the Skiller charges a certain amount of money per minute.
After the call, both the Skiller and the customer are required to rank the experience. If the ranking is high enough, the payment is processed instantly. Otherwise, there’s a period of 48 hours in which disputes can be presented and solved, or the Vanywhere team can reject the payment if the issue still persisted.
Blockchain-augmented landscapes
Of course, there are platforms that already build these environments, linking talent-providers with their clients (e.g. Upwork), while charging commissions on each transaction. The greatest issue with this model is that all funds have to pass through the sites jurisdiction before they are transferred from the client to the freelancer, which makes all this sites trust-based, which drives most new users away.
By implementing blockchain to safely store the Skillers’ and users’ rankings, while also coding smart contracts that take care of processing the payments, Vanywhere offers a completely decentralized platform where the relation between teacher and customer is not tainted by middlemen intervention.
Also, all the payments are to be done in the VANY token, a cryptocurrency customers can buy for $0.05 USD (supply: 800,000,000), and Skillers establish their fees in terms of tokens per minute of video or voice call. This allows for a massive reduction in fees (only 5%), a decentralization in payment and a secure storage of ratings to avoid tampering or massive downvotes.
Where to act?
Vanywhere has been in operations since 2015, where they made extensive research on the most popular markets where talent-search is heavily influential via online tutorials or videos. Once these markets were defined, the Vanywhere team contacted influencers and other renown personalities within each market in order to attract their followers into testing the platform.
The first markets available at launch were software development, tech support, cooking, travel, fitness and style/fashion. If you think about it, most of social media is currently filled with posts about one of these topics, so it would make complete sense to contact familiar faces in these fields to serve as spokespersons for your starting platform.
As the platform becomes increasingly more popular, more markets are evaluated and their inclusion is planned by contacting Skillers in such markets. Along the way, ratings also help in keeping the quality of the offered talent to be top, basic competition will force each Skiller to make the best content they can in order to get better ratings and faster payments.
This allows for an organic sense of growth within the platform, where more and more individuals are given the opportunity to share their knowledge as time goes on, while users gain more confidence in the system and widen their searches to start taking lessons in different markets.
This business model can take the skill-sharing economy by a landslide, providing great quality-of-life features for both Skillers and users, which can pave the way to a massive growth in popularity.
Vanywhere is currently in their way of making their official release, and with that they will also implement premium and promoted content (which will also be purchased with VANY tokens). You can find more about it at https://vanywhere.com/