Gems is Disrupting The Micro Task Economy

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Gems The New Micro Task Economy

4 min readJan 9, 2018

Gems ICO

Gems is the hottest new ICO. Many people are interested in getting involved due to the idea and the founding team. The goal of Gems is to create a more efficient, decentralized micro-task economy based on consensus, fairness, and market efficiency. The Gems Platform connects those who want work done (“requesters”) and human workers (“miners”).

What is a Micro Task Anyway?

Micro tasks — small tasks that require human judgement, can be completed independently over the internet, and are part of a larger unified project. This practice aids organizations who need humans to complete tasks that computers otherwise cannot and is widely used by large tech companies today.

State of the Art

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an online marketplace where requesters can crowdsource data collection by paying workers to perform micro tasks

CrowdFlower is a venture backed company, raised $58 million on a platform that combines machine learning and humans-in-the-loops for business class data analysis.

What Is The Problem With Existing Solutions?

High fees — Amazon charges a 20% fee on any amount paid out and an additional 5% for requesting workers with a good track record, tasks with 10 or more assignments are charged an additional 20% fee, totaling upwards of 40% in total fees. The high fees that charged on requesters ends up impacting the miners with reduced wages.

Markets with an unnecessary fee structure like this gouges potential business applications and is not conducive to an efficient market. We see less consumers in the market because of higher costs and less suppliers because of lower wages.

Centrally designed UI/UX can be difficult to use and often fails to dynamically adapt to customers needs. The UI/UX of MTurk for example is quite dated.

Low wages — many MTurkers earn less than $5 per hour

Verifying accuracy of results from workers is difficult, requesters must use redundancy

Many people do not have access to a bank account and therefore cannot use the system

The approval process is privacy invasive and difficult

How Gems Addresses Current Market Failures

Eliminating superfluous fees creates a more efficient marketplace. One cost we may want to consider regarding fees and market efficiency is the gas used in transaction when “staking” gems to a job, The Gems team is already working on payment channel solutions to help reduce necessary transaction fees. Micro-Raiden is a good example of one protocol that could help address this.

Gems Modules are interfaces built on top of the Gems Platform. Modules are the tools miners use to perform tasks. The Gems team will work hands-on with early requesters to build reusable UI/UX open source modules to be used on the Gems Platform. Furthermore, the Gems team will build and open source reusable components of modules that will allow the ease of use for anyone to build another module, creating a better user experience and product for providers and customers in the micro task economy.

Anyone who can maintain standard of quality determined by the market can build on top of the Gems platform and become a provider. This model creates a more fair system where your ability to participate is not dependent on your access to a bank account.

Okay, How Do We Ensure Quality of Work?

When a requester is looking to hire a miner they can require the miner to stake a token. This creates a “skin in the game” situation where the miner will be incentivized to perform well at the risk of losing the staked tokens.

After the miner completes the work, another another actor called the verifier will verify the work of the miner. Verifiers have a high trust score on the network and must stake tokens as well, but a lesser amount. The verifier is paid based on how much work they had to relative to the miner, up to receiving the same payment for repeating the task

A report on each request will be produced for the miners and verifiers to see before accepting a task. Reports include the aggregate number of tokens paid out on the network, the total amount of task given on the network and the number of times the requester has reverted the work of a verifier.

I am happy to say that I support Gems. This is yet another great application of blockchain that brings us one step closer to a more trusted, fair, distributed, consensus-driven economy. Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, ICO’s (insert buzzword here) are not just a hot new technology, they are implementations of ideas that create new economies and modes of interaction. The technological implementation secures our ability and faith in an idea.

Invest wisely.

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