Introducing Dot Marketplace; Microtasking App for Crypto Communities

Communities are the lifeblood of crypto projects. In fact, they are the primary reason the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem is heading to the moon. But the industry seems to be ignorant of their communities’ strength, why you ask?

Because most cryptocurrency projects get help from external agencies to contribute to their development, marketing and other initiatives, this not only adds up to your cost but is also very counterproductive to the whole idea of creating community-owned and managed applications.

Dogecoin is a perfect example of where strong communities can take crypto projects. It’s currently a $35 billion asset, all thanks to its community involvement. Imagine how far communities like this can take your projects if you are able to engage and incentivize them for their contribution

Building with the community lifts the dependencies on outsiders. It increases community involvement and thereby invites the most support to your project. But how do you do this? How do we bring the community members spread across the globe together and assign accountability? Your solution is Dot Marketplace.

What is Dot Marketplace?

Dot Marketplace is designed as a microtasking platform to facilitate community contributions to cryptocurrency projects. It is a two-sided marketplace to facilitate transactions within a community of token holders. People can create tasks on the platform, and other users can contribute to their projects in exchange for some native tokens. It gives people access to a larger talent base and enables collaboration.

For example, the protocol development team may create bug-bounties, or independent development projects for a specified token reward; the marketing team may run a meme or logo design context with rewards; or someone building a dApp may create tasks for freelance design and development. Token holders can bid for these tasks and get compensated in stable coin or the native token for performing the task.

How does it work?

Here’s a step by step walkthrough of Dot Marketplace.

• People who want to contribute to projects and folks who have project ideas/requirements can sign up on the platform with their email and name. While signing up, they need to mention their ‘User Type; Customers (Who post tasks) or Workers (Who apply for tasks), and describe their ‘User tags’ (type of tasks they would like to post/apply).
• Once logged in, users need to connect their Polkadotjs wallet to post/apply for tasks. You can connect multiple wallets to the platform. Click on ‘ Import account from pre existing seed’ to connect an existing wallet or create a new account if you don’t have any. Once connected, the balance for the same will automatically reflect in your Dot Marketplace account.

Note: You can also request test tokens using Airdrops to test the platform.

• As a customer, when you create tasks, an amount equivalent to the task cost is locked into an escrow from your account. As a Worker, you can bid on the tasks posted by the customers. To bid, workers also need to deposit an equivalent amount in the escrow. This protects the interest of both parties in case of a dispute.

• When shortlisted, the worker can begin working on the task whose status will be automatically updated on the dashboard. On completion, the status will change from InProgress to PendingApproval. The customer needs to approve the task and provide ratings to the worker. The worker can also provide ratings to the customer. Mandatory ratings ensure the authenticity and credibility of people on the platform.
• Once ratings have been provided, the amount will be released from the escrow — The customer will be debited with the amount for the task cost. The worker will be credited with the amount for the task cost + the amount he had locked into the escrow.

There’s More Coming!

In our roadmap, we plan to introduce a decentralized court for Dot Marketplace to solve disputes among the parties. But there’s more, since we are advocates of building with the community, we have made the source code of Dot Marketplace public. It’s based on Substrate. So, fellow developers, this is an invite for you to chime into building the coolest microtasking community. We are thankful to the team Web 3 Foundation Grants Program for their support.