A quick look at Gems Protocol
We recently posted a selection of projects we think people should look at this January and we got a deluge of messages about projects that we missed and really should have mentioned in our original list.
One of the projects we received a lot of messages about was the Gems Protocol and after digging into it further, the project interested us so we decided to make a small addendum to our previous picks…
What is it in a nutshell? A decentralised version of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which allows you to list small tasks which require human intervention. For example simple translations or categorising / labelling of pictures. One of the biggest use-cases for MTurk has been hiring humans to train AI systems.
MTurk has been the poster boy for the gig economy and Gems is a project which presents a unique business case for decentralising this type of platform.
Note: Gems is currently in pre-sale phase of their Initial Coin Offering and they’re running something called “Gems Community Programme” which you must join in order to get a chance to invest in the pre-sale.
Whilst we’re not exactly enthralled by this “proof-of-shilling” method of engaging the community, we think the project has some merits so we’d advise you to look into it further and decide whether you want to get involve at this stage or wait for the ICO.
Current Price: n/a
Website: https://gems.org/
Whitepaper: https://gems.org/whitepaper.pdf
Reasons to be optimistic
One of the major reasons we decided to take a closer look at this project is that we’ve tried to make use of the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform ourselves previously. Whether it’s an iOS application that needed someone to manually enter some quizzes or some localisation for a client project, there’s times when we don’t have the capacity to tackle repetitive work and need a little bit of outside help.
Amazon MTurk hasn’t worked for us though for numerous reasons. For a large period of time, it was only available to U.S. customers. That policy has been relaxed but MTurk is still expensive, the fees are larger than what we’d like and the platform and workers themselves are difficult to manage.
For workers, it’s also a similar story. Many workers rallied against Amazon’s poor payout policies and the platform was upgraded to handle bank transfers. This of course excludes some users completely (restricting the countries you can hire a workforce from) and of course if you don’t have a bank account — you’re out of luck completely!
There’s also an opportunity for disruption. MTurk workers have built an entire ecosystem on top of the platform. From browser plugins to pick out promising jobs to forums for support. There’s a large and passionate global workforce that requires some love in return and a real opportunity for Gems.
In terms of the “who’s who” behind Gems, it’s the brainchild of brothers Rory and Kieran O’Reilly. Both are recipients of the Forbes 30 under 30 award and their individual accomplishments are very impressive. It would be quite easy to list their advisors; people with ownership stakes in Aragon, District0x and Augur as well Biz Stone (Twitter) for example but we’re cautious to over hype a team based on their credentials when there’s plenty of other things to take into consideration.
Gems caught the attention of Vitalik Buterin during their launch announcement and they’ve also committed to a simple proof of concept demo (see above) before the pre-sale which doesn’t exactly demonstrate how the platform will work but at least suggests that their team has the in-house capacity to build what they’re proposing.
Reasons to be wary
We found it difficult to dig up info on Gems. The web site is severely disappointing in that there’s not a huge amount of information available. Clearly they want to draw our attention to the wholesome white paper (in which a great degree of effort has been invested) and the credentials of their team and advisors. But they’re still skirting on really important details such as the token sale details and the actual roadmap for the project.
We’d have a much better insight into the project with this information (although having said that, they do write an excellent blog) so at the moment we have to judge the project on what’s been put into public domain so far. That in itself is a little bit of a weakness because it seems to point to marketing being the achilles heel in Rory and Kieran’s endeavour.
Orphan Blocks Final Verdict: To sum up our interest in this project — you have have a good market / opportunity, a talented team and an all star cast of advisors. If it was really that simple, this would be all the ingredients of a successful project. The early signs from their community (a rather flimsy metric to be fair) seems to suggest that the project will be warmly accepted.
But asking the community to shill the project in order to get access to the pre-sale will result in lots of fluff pieces over the coming weeks and we’d rather they relied on their excellent technical expertise and oratory skills to convince people to invest into the project. We look forward to seeing how this project pans out with bated breath!
