TalentLayer: 2023 in Review
Mainnet, memories, growth, and impact
Greetings, friends! Hope you’ve had a relaxing holiday season.
It’s this time of year where many of us start to reflect on the past 12 months. For much of our team, this has been one of the most memorable years of our lives. Today, we’re here to share with you a retrospective on where we’ve been and a preview on where we’re going.
First, we’ll revisit our ✅ goals from the beginning of the year and take a look at achievements.
Next, we’ll highlight some of the 🏅 biggest achievements of our community members this year (with some personal notes of gratitude).
We’ll wrap it up with a photo book of ✈️ our adventures for the year — from our big group house in Lisbon to our final hoorah in Istanbul.
It’s been a wild ride. Thank you to everyone who joined us on this adventure of a year.
Let’s get started.
✅ Revisiting Our Goals
TalentLayer started in summer 2023 with a vision to change how the world works (literally).
In the future, finding work will look different than how it does today; from asking your personal AI agent to find you gigs, to using niche frontends to interact with mainstream platforms. Work marketplaces (including freelance platforms, ride-share apps, gig apps and more) are evolving in the same direction as many other industries; towards open ecosystem models and away from siloization.
TalentLayer is a unified API to connect the world’s service marketplaces; helping current platforms give their users more of what they are searching for and fueling a new breed of platforms in the process.
Read about what TalentLayer means for end users. In 15 years, the world will run on open work infrastructure with user-owned reputation and uncensorable access.
Read about what TalentLayer does to empower platform builders. Today, TalentLayer helps platforms give their users more of what they need by pulling in excess resources from other platforms.
Our long-term vision is having all transactional hiring applications, leveraging TalentLayer as a low-level standard on the backend.
This isn’t something that can be achieved in one year. It’s something that will change the landscape of work for decades to come. But, we had to start somewhere.
For this, we had a plan.
Step 1: Launch the network.
Step 2: Grow an initial network effect — get the first 10,000 users in the protocol and have them start transacting. Our strategy was to have a few crypto-native marketplaces go live on us right after mainnet launch to do this.
Step 3: Incentivize more and more marketplaces to integrate us; gradually growing the network’s size until it shadows the size of even the biggest flagship marketplaces alone.
🥇 Biggest Achievements
We had some big goals for 2023. How did our achievements stack up?
Here are some of the things we’re most proud of doing in our first year building together:
💰 Raised $100K in incubation investment from Kleros Collective, Outlier Ventures, and Protocol Labs
🚀 Launched on mainnet on 4/4/2023
🇪🇺 Approved for a $125K grant and Seal of Excellence status from European Union through grants initiative NGI Search.
🏪 First 3 marketplaces went live on TalentLayer mainnet; WorkX, WorkPod, and BuilderPlace.
💻 TalentLayer SDK and API went live
🏆 Sponsored bounties at 4 hackathons and had 14 people submit towards them
💸 Had over $40,000 in transaction volume in the protocol
😃 Had over 12,000 people register for accounts
In some ways, we feel like we could have done more. We wanted to have more platforms live, more user accounts, more transaction volume, etc. We learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t work this year. We’ll be applying those lessons in 2024 to achieve even more, even faster.
⭐ Contributor Gratitude
TalentLayer isn’t your average team. We’re a movement of many passionate open-source contributors, builders, and founders. We’ve had many contributors join our ranks over the months — some for short time blocks and others for going on 2 years. Our movement is led by our founding team, who guides the vision and core protocol development. Every person mentioned here deserves our gratitude this year. Interested in contributing in 2024? Reach out to us here.
Romain
Romain is our Technical Lead and Co-founder on the Founding Team. He’s a perfectionist, making sure we build things the right way, and a coach, teaching our team and helping them grow with everything they do. He’s built a well oiled engineering machine that keeps running no matter the day. He’s got the ultimate “calm under pressure”: he’s managed to technically lead a team of devs without ever loosing his cool. He also loves Raclette.
Romain, it’s been one of the greatest experiences in my life to build with someone who I trust entirely, who is in sync with me on every thought yet somehow also challenges me (how does this work?), who is one of the most talented developers I know, and who is a true friend. Excited every day to build with you. LFCF. — Kirsten
Kirsten
Kirsten is our Executive Lead and Co-founder on the Founding Team. She passionately leads TalentLayer’s team and strategic vision (as well as our Twitter account).
It’s crazy how much we’ve lived and achieved together this year — it feels like a decade! I’m really proud and grateful to have you as my co-founder. You are the main motor behind our team, always there to ship, learn, grow, and climb trees whenever there is an opportunity. Your dedication and enthusiasm are contagious, making every challenge a shared adventure and every achievement a collective triumph. I see you learning and growing every day while keeping the same force! I can’t wait to continue, LFCF — Romain
Keep throwing gasoline on the TL fire ~*!& ❤, you’ve led the way for the team and you’re doing great ! — Quentin
Quentin
Quentin’s is our Founding Engineer and on the Founding Team. He’s been here engineering our smart contracts from nearly day 1. Quentin always holds us true to our mission, and is a voice for the end users — workers. Quentin has a magical gift to find four leaf clovers, and has shared some with many of our team members. He’s the original raccoon, inventor of the term raccooning.
Quentin, thanks again for everything you do to keep this misison moving forward. Especially, thanks for forcefully calling out a mistake in how we initially designed our fees system, and pushing us to correct it before our mainnet launch. This saved us.
Martin
Martin is a full-stack engineer and Core Team member for most of this year — he’s also been around since the beginning of TalentLayer. Martin has dozens of famous talents — from juggling to guitar — but his biggest superpower is being able to teach himself any skill in record time!
Martin, it’s been a pleasure to live this year with you; we’ve built so much, traveled so many places, and had so many adventures. From your jokes during late nights at hackathons to our piano ballads The TalentLayer Piano Player and whistle competitions, you’ve made this year one to remember. Good luck on growing the FiftyWei collective and excited to cheer on all of your achievements in the next year.
Dercio
Dercio is a data engineer, full-stack developer, and our de facto head of developer relations, repping TalentLayer’s ecosystem everywhere he goes. He’s been a contributor to TalentLayer also from nearly day 1. He’s our ultimate generalist and, famously, our resident DJ.
Brib, Birb, Spanish or Vanish, you bring the vibes with you everywhere you go. From the day we met, I always knew you were going to do great things. I told you that, that day, if you remember. This year, we’re SO PROUD OF YOU! You’ve come so far in achieving your goals one by one and it’s been the greatest to see you spread your wings as a developer, community leader, and the person everyone loves. Hugs, always. See you very soon! — Kirsten
Mattia
Mattia is an full-stack developer, entrepreneur, and one of the most talented devs we know. Mattia built TalentLayer’s dispute resolution system, delegation system, and many of our more complex elements. Mattia joined our Core Team from January to April 2023 to shadow Romain and Kirsten — learning about running startups by being by their side through key decisions and strategic work. Since then, Mattia’s been killing it building indie software products and winning so many hackathons on the side.
Mattia, your work was pivotal to our launch on mainnet — thank you for everything you did to make TalentLayer a reality leading up to our launch. It was a pleasure having you on the team and teaching you all we could. We know you’ll be successful in everything you set your mind on (and you know that too). We’re excited to follow (and hopefully use) the products you ship in the coming years.
Emil
Emil is a Solidity and backend engineer and economic design researcher. Emil was core to engineering key parts of our infra, including our subgraph and search capabilities, but more than that, he was pivotal in forming our understanding of our ecosystem design. He’s a co-author of our white paper.
Emil, your work will always mark TalentLayer as long as it lives; you were behind many of our most important economic design cornerstones that are the foundation of all we’ve built. Thank you for always pushing us to think through the implications of what we build in our early stage, and how it impacts everything we do going forward. We’re so excited for you in your new role and can’t wait to see what you achieve in the coming years.
Pranav
Pranav is a full-stack developer and entrepreneur who’s the dev behind the TalentLayer SDK and API, among other things. Pranav loves his guitars (visible from every video conference) and was a winner of the first-ever ETH India.
Pranav, thank you for finding us on WorkX and for DMing us till we responded!!! We could have never imagined then how core you would become to what do at TalentLayer. Your talent, your experience, and your energy are so appreciated. You’re the reason our API and SDK are live! This is the foundation that the coming year will be built on, and it’s importance can’t be understated. Thank you every day for being here. Looking forward to meeting up IRL finally at one of the hackathons next year.
Gathin
Gathin is a full-stack developer who has been contributing since September of this year. Ever since coming on, he’s been a consistent collaborator! Notably he helped us migrate from Ethers.js to Viem, shipped a lot of features for BuilderPlace, and more! Gathin lives and breaths #buildinpublic and often shares his work on his Linkedin and Twitter.
Thank you for the passion you bring to everything you do and for your willingness to share your story with others. Still crazy that you just found us through investigating our Gitcoin profile a few months ago, and now you’ve contributed so much. It’s a pleasure to have you on the team and looking forward to shipping and growing together in 2024.
Yash
Yash is a full-stack developer and serial hackathon champ. He’s been shipping extended features for TalentLayer including the our Lit Protocol and Request Network integrations.
Yash, thanks for your work, but even more so for always making sure we have healthy warm food to eat at TalentyLayer Houses! Very glad I randomly started talking to you at ETHGlobal Lisbon, and then it turned out that you were “supposed to talk to me” thanks to Christina’s recommendation. Proud of your decision to go full-time building this year. So happy to see you continue winning so many hackathons around the world. Excited to see what your entrepreneurial spirit will create next. — Kirsten
Carl
Carl is a serial entrepreneur, full-stack developer, and jack of all trades. Carl had been building towards a very similar vision as TalentLayer and decided to join forces instead of compete. He stayed with us in TalentLayer House Lisbon and helped us think through many foundational principles on which we’re built.
I remember our long walk we had from one side of Lisbon to the other side of Lisbon — where we talked about all things marketplaces, what you were building with Floo Network and what I was building with TalentLayer. Afterwards, you decided to join forces and bring all the nuances and huge insights that came from your obsessive research of this market. Many of the frames of reference I use on the daily were placed by you. For this, I’m grateful. You are one of the minds I look up to the most for your creativity, confidence, and grit. Excited to see everything you build in the future, after all, you can do Anything.— Kirsten
Owen
Owen is our trusted advisor. He’s been around blockchain since before Ethereum, and is our anchor when it comes to making sure we’re building both useful and revolutionary technology.
Owen, you are our spirit guide. Ever since we met at ETH Prague 2022 we’ve been philosophically in lock step, and you’ve helped us make some of the most important decisions we’ve had this year. So proud of your work on our sister protocol ecosystems Wavelength and Vouch and excited for all you’ll achieve next year.
Tom
Tom is a recent MBA grad who contributed as a grant writer last winter! He scouted for and secured multiple grants for TalentLayer that helped us avoid dilutive fundraising when the market was down.
Tom, your work on the EU grant and others are a big part of the reason we’re still here today! Your contributions made all of what we’ve done to date possible. So glad that Goncalo connected us last winter.
Mitko
Mitko is an entrepreneur and seasoned marketing and product expert who’s been contributing ever since stumbling on a post of ours in the Gitcoin Kernel Slack channel. After teaching himself to code, he’s now contributing on the engineering side as well.
Mitko, thanks for leading product and marketing workshops with our team to help us make sure we’re building products that solve problems. Your mental models have been hugeley helpful. Looking forward to more work on this end (and software development!) next year.
Ahmed
Ahmed is a wunderkind full-stack developer — efficient, opinionated, and always building the sleekest applications. We first met him at ETH Rome where he solo-hacked the 1st prize project for our bounty. The rest is history.
Ahmed, thanks for building some sick products on TalentLayer and for deciding to join our open-source community afterwards. BuilderPlace looks stylish because of you. Looking forward to seeing you again soon at the next TalentLayer House.
Bertrand
Bertrand is a full-stack developer and entrepreneur who’s contributed to TalentLayer during multiple hackathons this year.
Thanks for joining us on our hacking adventures and for stayig with us at TalenetLayer House! You always bring good ideas and good vibes wherever you go. Looking forward to more next year!
Marsian
Marsian, a frontend developer and friend of Yash, joined our crew to contribute towards the SDK’s development to get it ready in time before ETHRome.
Excited to keep collabing next year, and thank you for everything you’ve done.
Stefano
Stefano is a graphic designer and web developer who made the new (professional version) of the TalentLayer Raccoon!
Stefano, the importance of this raccoon can not be understated. Thank you.
Udhaykumar
Udhaykumar, a full-stack developer, is one of our newer OS contributors!
Thanks for your work on improving our XMTP integration and looking forward to really getting started next year!
Scott
Scott is an advisor to TalentLayer and a cofounder of Gitcoin. Scott always brings great ideas to the team, from ways to approach new partnerships to fundraising strategy.
Scott, thanks always for your support in our efforts! Looking forward to tackling new challenges together next year.
❤️ Friends Forever
We also wanted to give a shout-out to our friends who’ve been by our side from the beginning.
The WorkX Team
WorkX was the first platform to go live on TalentLayer, and we’ve never met a team more aligned with us on mission and vision.
Rik, Daniel and team, It’s been a pleasure to hang, hack, and travel the world with you this year. We remember the day we met in complete serendipity at a cafe during ETH Lisbon 2022 — when Daniel came over to ask us what we were working on, because it sounded a LOT like what he was working on. Cheers to many more adventures, and changing the way the world works together.
Memester
Memester, what can we say, you’ve been one of our biggest cheer leaders ever since you attended our workshop at FIL Lisbon 2022. You were the first ever person to post a job on TalentLayer, you always shill us to possible partners, and you even HACK on our bounties at hackathons. Thanks for inviting us to your birthday party and letting us live at your grandpa’s house for a week ❤️ You are seriously the best.
✈️ Our IRL Adventures
While the TalentLayer team is fully remote, we’re always making excuses to hang out in person. Luckily, with so many hackathons around the world, it’s not hard to do. We’ve seen each other in over 10 countries this year, which is wild to think about.
It all started in Lisbon…
TalentLayer House Lisbon
We started off the year living in a 13 bed group house in Lisbon as part of the Kleros Incubator! We had the original TalentLayer House for three months, and it was such an amazing time full of memories. Some of us lived their full-time, and others popped in and out. The house was always buzzing with people coming and going and sharing innovative ideas. We also took plenty of time for surfing, boxing, rock climbing, and cooking so many “mystery box” dinners together.
The Kleros Incubator
For the first 3 months of the year we were in the Kleros Incubator working out of The Block coworking in Lisbon. It’s where we built our MVP and launched TalentLayer on Mainnet! So many memories at The Block — from making tortillas for lunch on the patio to all clicking the “go live on mainnet” button together.
ETH Denver
We started out at the Gitcoin Retreat in Boulder for some cold ice baths, then headed to Denver! ETH Denver was one of the wildest hackathons and conferences of the year. It’s where we had our first big raccooning session (courtesy of Quentin stuffing his backpack with soooo much goodies). It’s where we danced with bananas. Thanks again to Developer DAO and Fluence who gave our team a scholarship to attend ETH Denver.
We attended as hackers and shipped BettRPC, a tool that increases reliability of RPC calls using Fluence.
We also won the ETH Denver pitch competition this year!
ETH Porto
Porto was so beautiful, and one of our fave hackathons of the year. It was a smaller crowd with big ideas and a lot of cool projects.
We attended as hackers and shipped ZKPOW, a tool to let you prove your work reputation without revealing personal data, built on TalentLayer. We had the pleasure to hack on it with Daniel from the WorkX team!
We also had time for shenanigans. We raccooned 10 boxes of pizza and ate them for days after. We also found a ton of 4 leaf clovers for the whole team thanks to Quentin!
Algarve Team Trip
To celebrate our mainnet launch, we took a trip with the team to the Algarve! We were just in time to celebrate Memester’s birthday party (and give him a homemade gift). We had fun surfing together one last time.
Visiting Owen, and Mitko in London
Kirsten traveled to London to visit our contributors and some partners! Also stopped by the Outlier Ventures meetup.
Consensus
Romain and Kirsten won tickets to Concensus as a prize for winning the ETH Denver Pitch Competiton. That was another awesome week of meeting new friends and experiencing Texas culture. We raccooned some awesome fidget toys and lots of socks. We also casually convinced some firefighters to let us in their truck — after all, it’s not every day a French gets to experience a US firetruck like in the movies!
ETH Global Lisbon
ETH Global Lisbon was a blast — we built InfluLenser, an influencer marketing marketplace on Lens and TalentLayer.
ETH Dam
We flew to Amsterdam to visit the WorkX team and boy was that a memorable event. Not one, but two of our TalentLayer x WorkX teams won prizes as hackers. Romain and Rick’s team ended up winning the Defi Track prize for ZKPay, a private payrolll app built on TalentLayer, and Kirsten’s team ended up winning the quadratic voting prize for Zikileaks, a decentralized wikileaks.
We also played volleyball with a half filled waterbottle, cooked a Mystery Box breakfast with WorkX, went on a future of work friend’s boat, and biked around the city a ton!
SpagettETH
Kirsten and Owen visited SpagettETH where Kirsten gave a lecture on TalentLayer and the future of open graph networks.
ETH Prague
At ETH Prague we attended as hackers and built BeeTogether — a freelance collective management platform built on TalentLayer.
Kirsten and Romain also gave a workshop on how to built privacy-centric hiring tech using TalentLayer!
TalentLayer Mom voluneered at the event! She became an iconic figure amongst the attendees.
We also did some rad mystery box cooking competitions, this time with Daniel from WorkPod as the chef.
ETH Barcelona
We attended ETH Barcelona as speakers and discussed the future of work on a panel discussion. Was great to connect with new partners and discuss TalentLayer!
ETH CC & ETH Paris
ETH CC was a blast! We attended ETH Paris as co-sponsors alongside XMTP. The top prize winner for our bounty was Freelenser, a freelancing platform for the Lens ecosystem, that was 100% embedded into a messaging-only interface. Some of the TalentLayer team also attended as hackers and built Trustky — a reputation aggregation tool for freelancers.
ETH Warsaw
ETH Warsaw was one of the most beautiful hackathons of the year, and TalentLayer House Warsaw was probably one of the coolest TL Houses to date (especially the rooftop)!
Our team attended as hackers and built ProofofPicture, a protography marketplace with anti-AI image verification tech, on TalentLayer.
Another incredible mystery box competition, this time with Yash as the chef, and Brib as the literal DJ with his full setup.
ETH Rome
ETHRome was our #1 favorite event this year.
We attended as sponsors, and got an awesome booth and banner set up thanks to Limone.eth! Pranav just finished the TalentLayer SDK and it was the first-ever time we would see it live in action.
We recorded a very funny Introduction to ETH Rome video for Quentin, who missed his flight at the last minute.
We brought a family of raccoons (gender neutral parent raccoon, and 4 children) who explored the hackathon. Unfortunately… a few went missing and we went on a mystery solving hunt. Their disappearance remains a mystery.
We had 6 teams submit towards our bounty, with 3 winners.
ZKPoo — A vote delegation marketplace.
BountyArena — A bounty platform for blockchain ecosystems to use for bug bounties, grants, and more.
GreatGrants — A grant platform for DAO members to vote on and allocate grant funding to recipients.
At the afterparty, Brib did a DJ set with Limone! Everyone loved it.
After the hackathon, the Emperor of ETH Rome came to TalentLayer house to cook us and frens his family recipe of Carbonara!!!
ETH Lisbon
We attended as co-sponsors alongside iExec, the main sponsor of ETH Lisbon. We had a joint booth and a joint bounty to build projects using both iExec and TalentLayer.
We had 2 teams win prizes for our bounty out of the 7 that submitted!
RaccBook — a decentralized lending application that uses TalentLayer ID work reputation to offer people undercollateralized loans.
TallyRally — a gamified marketplace for paid adversing.
We also had a lot of fun and shenanigans at TalentLayer House Lisbon… including getting locked out and trying to pick the lock to get back in 😜
Devconnect
We went to ETH Istanbul and Devconnect thanks to a travel grant from the iExec team! There we attended as hackers and built Geanie AI, a marketplace for AI agents built on TalentLayer, using iExec for private data access.
iExec Incubator
We visited Lyon for the iExec Incubator launch party and pitch event! We recorded a lot of interviews, attended some workshiops, and explored the city. We also tried HOT boba tea for the first time (it was good, I swear).
All in all, we visited 16+ events across 10+ counties this year, growing our team and our movement in the process. Grateful for all of the friends we’ve met and excited for more to come next year.
🥂 Cheers to Next Year!
We’re so excited to share some big announcements with you to ring in the new year!
It’s 2024. A year of the 4! Undoubtedly, a good year for team TalentLayer.
It’s been a pleasure growing, learning, and building with you all! Thanks to everyone who’s followed our journey and who read this till the end. Love you all and looking forward to the future.
Cheers!
The TalentLayer Community (🍀,🦝)
