The Future of Teamwork Runs on Blockchain

Covee Network
The Future of Work
Published in
5 min readAug 8, 2018
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Our blockchain-powered platform allows knowledge workers with different complementary skills to collaborate openly, fairly and efficiently in a technological environment by establishing trust and removing friction surrounding team coordination and data access.

Prior to the creation of the Covee Network, decentralized teamwork on a global scale was impossible. The technological resources of the past simply could not contend with issues surrounding distributed trust and remote team coordination.

By harnessing the power of blockchain and coupling it with advanced mechanism design, Covee has overcome these issues, providing a revolutionary solution that enables remote teams dispersed around the world to work together on complex problems.

Covee began in 2017 as the brainchild of three passionate founding members who shared a dream of reshaping the future of work in a way that would be far more flexible and transparent than existing systems. Our team has since grown to sixteen members, but we are still driven by the founding vision of Covee.

Rapid community growth has motivated us to communicate Covee’s vision again in order to provide the community with a stronger sense of why we are working on Covee today and how we view our role as early stewards of the ecosystem.

The Problem

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The world is increasingly turning to freelance and remote work in the so-called gig economy, a shift that has many benefits but comes with several downsides. The freedom and flexibility inherent to this style of work is great for simple, individual tasks; however, when it comes to more complex projects involving numerous stakeholders, barriers arise that make similar collaboration on such projects difficult if not impossible.

Here is one downside of the current freelancing platforms. Imagine being a part of a big project with several other freelancers, which are dispersed around the world. If everything goes well and everyone performs as expected, the workers get paid and the project is successfully completed. However, when there is a dispute between the parties, several different legal systems potentially have to be involved to resolve it, which can result in a costly and lengthy procedure. As of now, no platform exists that successfully solves this issue without involving formal legal contracts.

Our blockchain-based smart contracts will lead to more effective contracting and resolution of disputes without the need for third-party intermediaries, such as law firms and corporations, all of which now create a lot of friction and delays, including when it comes to payments, dispute resolutions, etc.

The highest-value projects in nearly every industry are performed by teams. Employment contracts, hierarchies and bonus payments impose structure and ensure delivery in traditional firms, but the world is waiting to see how a decentralized ecosystem could produce the same quality of output.

How could people who have never met before trust one another enough to openly collaborate?

How could sensitive information be treated confidentially in a globally distributed work situation?

What can be done to provide project initiators assurance that targets will be met throughout the lifespan of an endeavour?

In order to compete successfully, complex projects utilizing a decentralized structure need more than just reliable team members; they need systems that ensure fair and open evaluation, benchmarking and reputation management.

The existing freelancing platforms in the market do not provide such mechanisms because, in part, they are not powered by blockchain technology. Moreover, these system lack an effective incentive structure. In the current system, major issues such as free riding plague borderless teamwork and, as result, get in the way of such collaboration from achieving its true potential.

Our Mission

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Enabling smart people to solve complex problems. Together.

Empowering the workforce won’t come from technology alone; it will also come from uniting people around technology to foster revolutionary change. With this in mind, Covee empowers smart people with different complementary skills in a technological environment. It removes the friction surrounding team coordination, data access, and the tools to efficiently work with the data. When we see knowledge workers successfully take complex projects from inception to completion, thereby achieving real-world impact, we know we have achieved our mission.

Our Vision

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To create a decentralized, flexible and fair future of teamwork.

Our vision is driven by the opportunity to change the way teams collaborate remotely. The technological developments of the past years are the enablers of disintermediation — meaning, reducing the influence of or outright removing the middlemen from the equation — and can provide substantial value for participants.

Blockchain enables us to build a platform that eliminates the middleman and allows people to interact directly with one another quickly and efficiently. Every worker that participates in the ecosystem can have a stake in the success of the network — this helps us achieve the incentive alignment that is crucial for decentralized teamwork.

We are committed to giving smart people access to projects they want to work on and the capacity to apply their skills and creativity to solve problems through teamwork. Using our mechanisms, the participants will be rewarded for their contributions fairly.

In the next 10 years we believe that the largest source of value creation for humans will be data-driven knowledge work, organized via a decentralized, Blockchain-based digital economy. Covee is being developed as a platform that will enable that and shape the future of work — join our community and be the first to experience it!

The team will consistently provide updates through our social media channels and newsletter. We’ll also be posting quarterly updates through our Medium blog. We look forward to hearing feedback from the community!

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Covee Network
The Future of Work

The trusted platform for knowledge workers. Covee helps smart people find teammates — and matches them with rewarding projects. https://covee.network/