Project Update December 2022: The Future of the Marketplace, Worker Pass Utility NFTs Go Live, Initiatives for Women in Web3

What’s the latest news from iExec? This blog post will give some updates on what the team has been working on over the past few weeks. It’s impossible to capture everything, so for this blog post, we will focus on the hottest topics. On the menu for the last Project Update of the year: a deeper dive into the iExec new strategy, the launch of the Worker Pass Utility NFTs, and what we are doing to support women in Web3.

iExec’s Plan: Address a $145B Market

As 2022 is ending, we want to take the opportunity to share some insights about the upcoming iExec roadmap. If you have followed iExec for some time, you probably know the team has been working on reshaping the approach to the Marketplace. Perhaps you got some info by listening to our Twitter Space in November with Lead Community Manager Blair Maclennan, Head of Adoption Nelly Cornejo, and COO Johan Moonen. If you couldn’t attend, the recording is still available. Anyway, the Marketplace is a huge component of iExec and so it’s worth revisiting right now.

What does ‘Marketplace’ really mean?

First, let’s take a moment to examine the notion of ‘Marketplace.’ What is it? In a general sense, we define it as a place where demand meets supply for services or products, made available by an ‘intermediary.’ iExec COO Johan Moonen usually describes it as a football stadium, where two types of parties meet and play ball. What is the role of the stadium manager — the intermediary? Operating the facility. For instance, grooming the field, tracing the lines, providing entertainment to keep the users engaged, etc. In this sense, the Marketplace is more than just an open field. It is a dynamic meeting place whose well-defined rules and activities make it a desirable place for transacting.

Within the context of iExec — we are the intermediary that connects requesters and providers of value-added Dapps. The parties here can be developers, blockchain/Web3 projects, traditional Web2 companies… If you need additional help understanding Dapps, you can think of them as tools like DropBox or iTunes. The purpose of iExec as the intermediary? To offer requesters a catalog of high-value Dapps that can be easily used, and to help providers make the best of their Dapp by monetizing their usage. Besides being the intermediary that connects requesters and providers, iExec makes life easy for the latter by providing building blocks for developers so they can easily assemble them into applications for companies or projects to use.

For that purpose, the team has been working to identify the best market segments to address. Doing so meant considering iExec’s technical capabilities and strengths, while also evaluating trends, analyzing the market and competition, and identifying the segments where the needs were the strongest. And to make sure our approach collected the most accurate figures and insights, we collaborated with consulting companies such as Gartner.

Five Market Segments

With all this material in hand, we prioritized 5 need-based market segments for iExec:

• Governance,
• Protection,
• Privacy,
• Compliance,
• Data-processing.

These are also values that are part of the iExec DNA since the beginning. We won’t go through each of these market segments in this blog post, because it would take too long. Instead, let’s elaborate on one market segment to make it clearer.

Let’s choose the first market need we identified: the ‘governance’ need. It refers to the need for services where users can keep control and ownership of their assets while sharing them with other parties. This could be, for instance, businesses monetizing the use of a resource, whatever it is, to their customers or suppliers while remaining the owner of this resource. This is a market need that iExec can address thanks to its blockchain and confidential computing technologies.

Then, for each of these 5 need-based segments, we analyzed the targets, meaning the type of customers who buy or want to buy the services (our ‘requesters’). Here, we determined 3 types of Web3 customers and 3 types of Web2 customers. Following that, for each of these 5 segments, we identified several families of applications that these customers are looking for. At this stage, we have decided to focus on the most interesting families of applications. An example? If we go on with the ‘governance’ need, we identified the ‘Content Creators’ target. ‘Content Creators’ need applications to share their content with the public while preserving ownership and value.

How do we select the most interesting families of applications? Among the high numbers of potential applications we identified, we focus on the ones that drive significant sales, by:

• Providing the most value-add for the requesters by solving major issues for them, and by doing so, be priced relatively high,
• Addressing a high volume of requesters,
• Generating a high frequency of transactions per requester.

Obviously, these 5 focus areas will require work to develop products and apps accordingly. But, if we sum up these priority segments, iExec will address a $145B market. Our ultimate goal is to make iExec the Marketplace of choice for complex Web3 deals that grow the value of the actors’ computing assets.

How do we go there?

To complete this journey, iExec will rely on:

Finances: Our finances are strong, healthy, and well-managed. The bear market didn’t impact us. We have what it takes to invest over the upcoming years.

Hiring: The growth of the team is one of our priorities. iExec has grown from 20 to almost 50 employees in the last few years, and new team members continue to join the company each month. Today, we have more than 10 open positions, in every department: developers, marketing, sales… Tomorrow, we aim to double the workforce. It will take some time of course, but we can do it.

Worker Pass Utility NFT: Earn RLC in exchange for computing power

This was one of the most exciting pieces of news for the iExec community of 2022. But in case you missed it: iExec is launching a utility NFT — the iExec Worker Pass! The Worker Pass is a utility NFT that will allow you to join the iExec public Workerpool for a period of 30 days. This means you will connect your machine to the network, provide computing power and earn RLC tokens. While your machine will be connected to the pool, you will execute computational tasks and get paid in RLC tokens based on the number of tasks completed. The iExec team is delighted to be starting 2023 with this special public Workerpool event, using it as an opportunity to integrate NFTs with true utility into the iExec ecosystem.

Having this NFT will be the ONLY way to access the iExec public Workerpool. NFTs will be distributed over three separate drop application periods, the first happened a few days ago on Wednesday 21 December. The interest was huge! Thanks so much to the thousands of you who tried to get one and a massive congratulations to those who were successful! We’re looking forward to having you on board, see you in the public Workerpool!

And, if you weren’t quick enough to be on the list during Worker Pass Drop #1, there will be 2 more opportunities to apply for the Utility NFT: January 5 & January 12, 2023.

How can you apply for a Worker Pass Utility NF?

Three drops have been set up to distribute the NFT to our community. Each drop delivers a limited number of Utility NFTs. You need to follow these steps to increase your chances of securing this NFT:

• Be ready to apply on the web page at the exact time of the drop. You also need to be ready to provide your email address & public Ethereum address.
• You will then receive the FIRST email from iExec asking you to click a button to verify your email address and complete a Captcha.
• After that, you will receive a SECOND separate email to which you will need to MANUALLY REPLY to confirm your participation.
• You will be notified if you were successful 24 hours after the drop.

Remember the drops operate on a first-come, first-served basis — so make sure you complete all application steps as soon after the drop as possible!

The NFT will be minted to all successful wallets and the Workerpool will launch towards the end of January 2023.

Mark your calendars!

👉 The iExec Worker Pass Utility NFT webpage: https://www.workerpass.iex.ec/

Who can participate and what are the technical requirements?

Anyone can join the iExec public Workerpool to earn RLC in exchange for computing power. You need to be sure you can meet the technical requirements:

• For the 30 days, you must keep the NFT on the wallet you used for registration. Both this wallet and the NFT will be required to participate in the Workerpools.
• A worker can only run on 64-bit (x84) architecture — Intel/AMD. Please note that ARM is not supported (for instance, the new M1 Macbooks and EC2 t4g are not supported).
• Your machine needs at least 2 CPU Cores and 2GB RAM.
• You do not need an Intel SGX-compatible machine.

The workers’ RLC rewards will be based on the number of computational tasks they successfully execute. The worker pool manager will distribute tasks to workers at random.

What kinds of tasks will workers perform? And for what projects?

As you know, research has an important place in the company. iExec workers will work on computational tasks coming from the following projects:

Universe@home: this project uses computing power for universe modeling. Two examples of the problems being studied by astronomers that fall under with Universe@home project are the study of ultraluminous X-ray and the analysis of gravitational waves.

Web3: Supporting women in Web3

To end this Project Update, we would like to talk about another very important topic: our commitment to supporting women in Web3.

In October during EthBogota and EthLisbon, we started by sponsoring two events intended for women (respectively the Women in Web3 Breakfast and the Women in Web3 Brunch). Both were great occasions to meet our female colleagues committed to developing Web3. We hope to be able to support more meetings like these during the next events we attend.

Today, we are proud to announce our partnership with Unstoppable Women of Web3! Unstoppable Women of Web3 (also called ‘WOW3’) is an education group that aims to onboard women to Web3, and more widely to train the next generation of talents. WOW3 powers a range of educational materials about Web3, created by them or by its partner companies. Coinbase, Binance, OpenSea, Sandbox are just some of its partners.

Last (but certainly not least), a few days ago, iExec Head of Adoption Nelly Cornejo was named one of the most inspirational women in Web3! This is a well-deserved recognition that rewards Nelly’s passion and efforts to make Web3 and blockchain accessible to everyone. For some context, Nelly founded some years ago ‘TAAL Project’, a non-profit organization that helped the general public understand technology and promoted gender equity in the tech sector. She is also part of the jury and mentor for the World Summit Awards, an initiative that supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda by allowing digital innovators to showcase their ability to accelerate positive social impact using technology. At the European National Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) she is part of the ad-hoc working group on enterprise security. Nelly is regularly invited to conferences to speak about several topics like women in Web3, Web3 adoption, digital inclusion, and tech for good. Congratulations Nelly!

What is next?

As part of our collaboration with Unstoppable Women in Web3, we plan to create content about how blockchain and confidential computing can be used for data protection in the Web3 economy. In the coming months, we will continue to support similar initiatives to make Web3 accessible to everyone. Stay tuned!

Our strategy for the iExec Marketplace and the market segments we want to address, the launch of the NFT Worker Pass to join the public Workerpool, the beginning of our initiatives to support Web3 inclusion… We hope this blog post helped you get a better sense of what we are going for.

Thanks for reading and happy holidays!

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