Gems: Earning your first Crypto with Micro Tasks

What if people’s first experience with Facebook was purchasing and owning stock? It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that there would be much more interest in price movements than in impactful product developments. This is a simple example that parallels the cryptocurrency experience today.

Right now, people’s first crypto experience is oftentimes (if not almost exclusively) via exchanges. The introductory experience usually goes as follows:

1. Hear about the price of a particular coin

2. Make a Coinbase/GDAX Account (wait for verification…)

3. Deposit money and buy the coin

We can see the effect of this subtle, rarely-noted phenomenon in the cryptocurrency communities we join and the conversations that take place: it biases the initial community to traders and price discussions (disclaimer: this is, of course, a generalization and opinion — it’s not to say that all discussion revolves around price; there are great technical discussions that exist, but in objectively lower frequencies). Now, this isn’t awful in and of itself, but it certainly influences how the community develops, what projects get built, and what dialogues occur — the extent of how this shapes the community is perhaps unquantifiable.

Alas, it doesn’t need to be this way.

Your friends’ first experience with crypto doesn’t have to be them purchasing it, mentally associating it with the fiat money spent, habitually checking the coin’s price, and perhaps becoming disinterested if the price falters.

Rather, their first experience with crypto can be earning it. They can contribute to a project, complete tasks, and be fairly compensated in the process. Imagine if the process looked like this:

1. Sign up on a website

2. Do a 1 minute task

3. Earn your first crypto

Not only does this decrease wait time for getting involved with crypto and dissociate (somewhat) the link to an investment, but it also plants the perception early on that blockchain technology has utility (by decreasing socioeconomic inefficiencies such as consensus by redundancy, banks, fees, etc. as described in the Gems White Paper).

This would be the newcomer experience on Gems. The Gems Platform allows participants to earn GEM tokens by completing micro tasks, and anyone with a working internet connection can participate. By lowering the barriers to entering the crypto world — banks, wait times, association with an investment and perceived risk of loss — we want to make it easier for millions of users to participate.

Blockchain technology, in our view, will change much of how the world’s companies operate. We think it’d be great if others could join this movement without being associated indirectly as investors — and that’s what we’re trying to do with Gems.

Learn more and follow the Gems saga:

• Follow Our Twitter @Gems
• Visit Our Website Gems.org
• Join Our Telegram
• Read our White Paper
• Follow our Blog
• Email: hello[@]Gems[dot]org

I’d like to thank Alex Van de Sande for introducing the concept of trader bias in the cryptocurrency community to me, inspiring this thought piece, and contributing ideas. Additionally, I’d like to thank Sol Kim for her substantial edits.