Connecting the Blockchain skilled workforce: An Interview with the Founders of Hiway — The blockchain tailored marketplace for work
There’s only so much a product can tell you about itself despite all the manuals, the guides, the white, yellow, and brown papers. To truly understand it sometimes one may have to tear it apart to see what ticks and what holds it together, put it to the test under various conditions and document responses and see how many ways it can be put back together again. Easier to just talk to the founder — or in the case of the decentralized workforce marketplace platform, Hiway — founders.
Founded by a team with over two decades in the job employment and recruitment industry, Hiway has set its sights on building a skilled manpower acquisition and exchange marketplace, to not only address the shortcomings of the current market but also fuel the companies of tomorrow’s industry; the blockchain.
“There are numerous problems facing the industry to be honest, but I think the growth is one of the most important changes we’ve encountered” says Simon Rikmenspoel, Hiway’s Founder and Head of Product. “If you look at the last couple of years, especially after the economic crisis in 2008, you’ve seen a lot of people been laid off. Something which started the big movement to people becoming freelancers. For us, this has been both an opportunity as at the same time a threat”
Having seen a rise in the demand for temporary employees — which admittedly is something any recruitment agency would be delighted by, Simon realized that there had to be a better way to protect both employers and employees without meddling. Hence, the blockchain solution Hiway was born.
“You see, the big movement the last couple of years has been the growth of helping freelancers connect globally online. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr have seen enormous growth because of this and are now building platforms we wouldn’t have thought possible a couple of years ago. If you combine this fact with the possibilities of blockchain, you would say the options for freelancers should become more and more interesting”
Identifying the foundation for a solution is one thing, selecting which of the various structures built on the foundation to house the solution is another thing. For the Hiway team, this involved examining all available options and judging them based on certain criteria including adoption, accessibility, and scalability. Ethereum emerged head and shoulders above all the other solutions.
“Ethereum is the safest choice in our opinion right now” Simon Rikmenspoel, Founder & Head of Product, stated. “If you look at the blockchain landscape there are a couple of networks we could have used but if you’re honest there isn’t a network better tested than the Ethereum network. Easy choice. But keep in mind that we are always open to better options for our product, we have a close relationship with Ark and it would be amazing to look at option at their product, but for now that would simply not be possible”
Developing something new is bound to come with its own sets of challenges. Developing a game-changing platform for an emerging technology addressing an estimated $900 billion marketplace, takes these challenges to whole new heights.
“Everything’s a challenge if I’m honest. We are building something completely new and are confronted with challenges every day. Legal, technical but also marketing wise, how do we explain people what it is we’re doing. I think because we are using the newest technology you can find you will always be the one having to solve the biggest problems, coming second to the party is always easier but that’s not why we are here. It’s exactly the fact that we have the possibility to build something far better than the current options that we are as excited as we are!”
And since the team wants build something exceeding better than the existing structure, it was time to present the elephant in the room, crypto volatility.
“Talking about challenges, haha” Thale Sonnemans, Co-founder & Creative Director, said laughing “The price volatility of tokens has been one of the major challenges at the Hiway office. We understand that for the platform to go mainstream people will want to work with euros, dollars or any other well know currency. Switching between tokens and those currencies and making sure people receive what they expecting to receive is one of the major challenges and we think and hope to have found a solution in that problem in our Job Value Reserve system. A sort of hedge fund that will compensate people if the price of the token decreases while they are working. On the other hand, it will increase in size when price value of the token increases. In the end we want people to receive the amount of FIAT they expect and need to pay their rent. In our MVP you will only be working with and for tokens, so this whole problem will not occur yet, but we understand the importance of this in relation to global adoption”
With the problem of volatility solved, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that’s all she wrote. You’re wrong. Volatility may be the biggest news headline grabber in the crypto industry, but it’s far from being the only challenge dogging the industry. Liquidity, adoption, accessibility, and integration are a few of the other challenges facing the industry — challenges that Hiway has girded itself to take down in the second part of this interview.
Stay tuned.
For more information about Hiway, please refer to:
