Introducing Ethlance — First job market on blockchain is online!

I’m very excited to announce that ethlance.com has been officialy launched!
Ethlance is a first of its kind platform for connecting freelancers and developers. It has its database running completely on Ethereum public blockchain and front-end source files distributed on IPFS, that means it’s completely decentralised.

This brings us to the best feature of Ethlance: Since people are running platform by themselves, Ethlance doesn’t need to take any cut of money made by their hard work. Yes, the amount of Ether employer pays is exactly what freelancer gets! Excluding tiny gas fees, of course :)

Is it working already?

Yes, currently, the app supports all the basic functionality you would expect from freelance platform such as creating jobs, searching, applying, inviting, invoicing, leaving feedback. At the moment, there’s no full text search, but searching by skills works well enough and you can choose from more than 4700 predefined skills!

Although most of messaging between a freelancer and an employer is meant to be done off-chain, you can send the other person a message when submitting following forms: proposing for a job, accepting proposal, inviting for a job, sending invoice. Users should settle on what free service they’ll use for work chat, such as Slack, Skype, etc. In future Whisper might be used for integrated chat.

Ethlance smart contracts don’t hold any money. The only time when you send Ether to the app is when you, as an employer, pay an invoice. At that point, smart contract serves just as a proxy, saves the fact that you paid and forwards money to a freelancer.

The app works well with MetaMask as well as Mist. There’s nothing special about using these tools with Ethlace, you work with them the same way as you’d work with any other Dapp.

What does the future hold?

In Ethlance vision, anybody can easily find a job and fully support their living by earning a cryptocurrency, free of any kind of fees, regulations and restrictions!

But that’s long way ahead :) so these are some features on TODO list:

Identity verification with uPort. — This feature is considered very important for Ethlance. It will make our reputation system more trustworthy and prevents identity theft.

Internationalisation, Advanced search, Integration with Status, Chat, Time tracking, Automated invoicing and so on.

Also, important thing on our TODO is to explain benefits and motivate people to start earning their wages in cryptocurrency. Especially for newcomers in this field. Personally, I think a big change in cryptocurrency adoption will come after people will massively earn them and not just exchanging for fiat money.

So who’s behind Ethlance?

Well, it’s just me. I created Ethlance as a passion project over the course of few months, while having full-time freelance job. This project was presented at ether.camp hackathlon, ended up on fair 11. position, but I admit I’ve put no effort into project presentation, was just too busy coding ;) In the future, team may get larger, hiring of course via Ethlance :)