Freelancing has evolved from a fringe venture to a $900 billion annual industry vying for almost half of the global workforce engagement. This extremely mobile and versatile workforce is breathing new life into businesses, enabling them to tap into a highly adaptable labour force with none of the cost and overhead of the traditional market.
A House of Cards
Freelancing platforms have been integral to the growth of this industry, connecting freelancers with millions of employment opportunities. These platforms mediate the exchange of services, provide employers with a global resource pool for matching talents to their needs, and easing communications – in theory. For these services, freelancing platforms have reaped billions off the back of the hard work of freelancers, charging them commissions as high as 25% of their pay for merely facilitating connection. These platforms are also dogged by security breaches, contract breaches, privacy and security concerns, fake profiles, and fake reviews making them extremely dicey to navigate and trust.
Apparently, freelancing platforms are big businesses and are operated as such, meaning an inherently centralized structure requiring several layers of mediation and intermediaries to keep it all together. With these comes increased overhead that must be taken out of the commission fee. The bigger the platform gets, the more the cogs that comes into play and the oil needed to grease them. Simply put, the traditional system scales poorly, tasks workers too much for offering basic connectivity, and remains the biggest barrier to its own growth. Blockchain technology can solve these challenges.
Blockchain technology offers a vastly superior, secure, and infinitely more scalable foundation for the development of a workforce marketplace without borders, intermediaries, and at extremely cheaper cost. The decentralized nature of this technology eliminates the centralized point of failure of the traditional system, while ushering a quality the industry is sorely in need of; transparency. The technology also affords users the ability to immediately settle the exchange of values regardless of geographical location. However, it’s one thing to have the materials to build solution, it’s another thing to actually build this solution. Hiway is building exactly this.
A Highway to the Future
Hiway is a blockchain-based, workforce recruitment and engagement marketplace directly connecting workers to employment opportunities. Powered by a proprietary AI system and Big Data, Hiway is putting workers and employers directly in control of how they connect and engage each other without worrying about the other party not fulfilling their end of the contract. AI-powered smart contracts and the platform’s native WAY tokens takes the place of traditional contracts and currencies on the network.
Smart contracts eliminates the inherent risk that comes with working with formless entities on the internet, while ensuring that both parties will uphold and fulfil the terms of engagement. WAY tokens makes it easy to embed payment into any contract without having to deposit to an intermediary. Once the terms of engagement are fulfilled, the smart contract automatically release the stored funds based on information stored on the immutable blockchain.
In recognition of its role as a facilitator, rather than a gatekeeper or bank, Hiway will only charge a nominal fee of 3% for connecting parties, 3%. This rate, which is 10 times lower than current platforms, is as a result of the team’s unique insight into the industry based on a proven track record of running its own recruitment agency for over a decade. By leveraging the blockchain, Hiway is set to unleash the potentials of the gig economy, making it openly accessible to everybody and scalable to the growing needs of the industry
