Introducing Thread: Powering a smarter, connected freelancer ecosystem
No matter how you look at it, freelancing has grown immensely over the past ten years. More people are turning to freelancing as an employment choice, demand for freelance labor is up, and freelancers are producing more work now than they ever have historically. Objectively, we largely have technological enhancements to thank for this employment shift.
And the data supports that this trend is only going to continue to grow.
However, it’s not exactly “up and to the right” for everyone. As it is, freelancers and employers join centralized platforms to expand their networks in hopes of having greater access to each other. Instead, they are mutually shrouded, leaving them to rely entirely on the size, efficacy and goodwill of the platforms to find, recommend and compensate each other.
The current online freelancing ecosystem is stymied by a closed, centralized model of obfuscation and secrecy, designed to lock freelancers and employers into a given platform at the price of liberty, accuracy, trust and efficiency. This presents unique problems to key players in the online freelance market model, primarily to the freelancers themselves.
Our team has gotten to know these problems first-hand in building out the freelance marketplace, Loom. And, these learning experiences have compelled us to create solutions to these problems — not only for us — but for other platforms as well.
Welcome to Thread
Thread is a blockchain-based protocol that will provide the foundation for a more open, interoperable and frictionless freelancing ecosystem that benefits all parties involved, from freelancer to employer to platform.
By leveraging blockchain, Thread opens up this process to scrutiny, improvement and evolution, eventually ushering in a cost-efficient era of seamless search, hiring and even payment within the freelance community.
This solves key problems that have plagued existing work platforms: network lock-in, data fragmentation, and unnecessary cost, setting the standard for an inclusive ecosystem that facilitates open freelancer-employer communication, even across different platforms.
Thread will evolve the current freelancing site model to best serve the needs of users by eliminating the friction and barriers that necessarily arise from the current closed, centralized structure.
Why this matters
77 Million people freelance worldwide. And U.S. freelancer growth has nearly doubled each year since 2014. With freelancing expected to grow by 20% through 2020, trust, data and reputation information are critically important in this fast-growing segment of the worldwide workforce. Gone are the days when key participants, such as high-skill workers, forgive control to closed, centralized data systems. The Thread protocol opens this process up to democratic scrutiny and cross-platform communication so search, reputation and even payment can be uniformly managed, not juggled.
With Thread, freelancers and platforms can expect:
- Increased trust across networks, to increase the speed of matching and the volume of work completed.
- Shared information across networks, resulting in top freelancers and employers rising to the top of searches, further increasing the speed of matches.
- Logarithmic improvements, benefitting industries reliant upon the freelancing ecosystem.
- Better-quality employment matches, leading to efficiencies in hiring and work completed, fueling innovation and economic growth.
After working on these problems in the freelancing industry and experiencing these issues first hand, we believe in decentralized solutions to these problems, and the power of decentralized outcomes to empower high-skill workers around the globe.
Our mission is to power a smarter, connected freelancer ecosystem.
And in doing so, Loom will be the first platform to adopt the Thread protocol, jumpstarting the usage of this decentralized technology with thousands of contractors across more than 100 countries around the world.
We invite you to read more specifically about how and why we’re creating this in our whitepaper, which is available for download on our website now.
And if you would like to get involved, please send me a note and follow along the Thread journey with the links below — we enthusiastically welcome your support.
Cheers, to the future of work.
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1. Matthews, B. (2017, January 8). Freelance Statistics: The Freelance Economy in Numbers 2. Chaney, P. (2016, December 5). 20 Surprising Stats About the Gig Economy 3. Horowitz, S. & Rosati, F. (2014, September 4). FREELANCING IN AMERICA: A National Survey of the New Workforce 4. Emergent Research & Intuit Inc. (2010, October). Intuit 2020 Report
