Please describe your proposed solution.
Direct work contracts between organizations and remote developers may lead to disputes such as organizations not paying salaries, and freelancers not fulfilling deliverables. Centralized escrow services such as Upwork is expensive (up to 23% commission fees) and the decision is completely up to the platform.
Socious provides decentralized escrow to protect both remote developers and hiring organizations with cheaper fees. There are three benefits to Socious’ decentralized escrow mechanism:
- Decentralized decision-making: Socious uses our proprietary impact credentials “Socious Deeds” for governance purposes. Through on-chain governance processes, Socious Deed holders are able to vote on various aspects of organizational operations, allowing community-wide decision-making. Decisions on allocating funding, building new partnerships, verification of impact organizations, reviewing reported organizations/users/content, dispute resolution, and developing the platform can all be executed through this decentralized process. Socious Deeds are verifiable credentials, and therefore non-transferrable, in order to ensure that governance power is widely distributed and is in the hands of informed decision-makers. Only those who have an impact score above 700 are issued these verifiable credentials. Each Deed contains information on the user’s interests/expertise on specific social/environmental issues based on their behaviors on the Socious app. The voting power is proportional to their interests/expertise on the topic that is being voted on. For example, if the topic is about allocating funding to an environmental project, the votes of the users who have contributed their time/money to environmental projects and have posted/commented on content related to environmental issues will be weighed accordingly. In centralized platforms, these decisions are made by the company that owns the platform, which may lead to issues of censorship and abuse. On Socious, these decisions are made by a panel of three Socious Deed holders. For example, an organization submits an application to be verified as an impact organization in order to receive an array of benefits that come with the status. A panel of three Socious Deed holders will be randomly chosen to review the organization’s application and vote on whether the organization should be verified as an impact organization. The three Deed holders will receive THANKs as rewards for their contribution. Participation in the panel is completely voluntary, so Deed holders can opt out of the possibility to be randomly selected to participate. Deed holders also participate in dispute resolutions between the organization and the hired freelancer. For example, when an organization believes that a project was not completed, but the contributor claims it was completed. In this case, either party can submit a dispute; they agree to disclose certain information only to the panel of three decision-makers. When they submit a dispute, they need to stake a certain amount of THANKs for dispute settlement fees. The winning party will receive the refund/payment. The losing party will lose the amount staked and the judges will receive the staked amount.
- Automated payment: When the status of the project becomes “hired”, then the agreed amount will be moved to the “escrow wallet”, the organization can’t move the asset; When the status of the project changes to “completed” the fund is automatically transferred to the freelancer. If the project’s status changes to “canceled”, the fund is automatically returned to the organization. These transactions are done through smart contracts.
- Cheaper fees: a) unlike centralized platforms that use credit card providers for payment, Socious uses blockchain technology for payment, therefore eliminating the fees for the third-party company. b) because the dispute resolution is done by the community members, it reduces the operational cost of dispute resolution.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
The proposed solution addresses the challenge in the following ways:
The overall question to be addressed by the challenge is “How can we create a positive developer experience that helps the developer focus on building successful apps?”
Through our decentralized escrow system for work protection, we create a positive developer experience for freelance remote developers as well as hiring organizations. Our escrow system is based on a fair decision-making process supported by impact experts within the community. We also provide automated payment and cheapers fees for both freelance developers and hiring organizations.
Types of proposals include “Support structures” and “Incentivization structures”.
The proposed solution is squarely in these areas. We provide support structures for freelance work between developers and hiring organizations. We also provide incentivization structures to developers through our impact score and THANK tokens.
The project is highly relevant to the key metrics for the challenge:
- Number of developers actively building on top of Cardano. -> Because the developers’ work will be protected through the escrow system, we can attract more developers to the Cardano ecosystem.
- A sense of community and conversations. Having people around to talk with. -> Because Socious is also a social networking app, developers can connect with other like-minded developers and build a sense of community, and strike conversations.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Possible challenges or risks to delivering this project successfully include:
Risk: Building escrow smart contracts to an existing mobile app rather than a web app.
Strategy to mitigate: We will mitigate this challenge by learning and getting support from the Cardano and Gimbalabs communities.
Risk: Building escrow smart contracts for different types of payment schemes (project-based, hourly contracts, etc.).
Strategy to mitigate: We will mitigate this challenge by learning from the existing escrow systems and getting support from the Cardano and Gimbalabs communities.
Risk: Time allocation; we may face challenges in allocating sufficient time to dliver this project in time.
Strategy to mitigate: We have been carefully planning resource allocation among different projects. In addition to careful planning, we can mitigate the risk by leveraging our freelance resources; we’ve worked with 20 freelancers in the past who can contribute to the project if necessary.