Disclaimer: This review is an independent opinion and does not constitute investment advice. The review was a free opinion based on publicly available information and was intended to be objective.

15 January 2018

The reviewer has read the GEMS white paper, reviewed the interactions on the GEMS Telegram channel, various social accounts and read a number of 3rd party reviews.

Project Overview

This is a Decentralized Mechanical Turk platform powered by Ethereum. Gems is a protocol and marketplace for contracting workers to perform micro tasks in exchange for tokens. Workers' stake tokens in order to prove validity of their tasks and earn a reusable computed trust score, enhancing the cost-efficiency of the network while democratizing access to scalable micro task workers. Employers put tokens into escrow, and pay workers immediately after completion.

Team

The project has an “all-star team” and the reviewer is sure that they will be able to deliver a fully working solution in a few months. The team are developing rapidly and community members are currently participating in pre-alpha testing.

Competition

The whitepaper mentions that their competitors Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower are at a disadvantage as they charge high fees, have a bad UI and don’t cater for the unbanked. Those disadvantages are not impossible for the existing players to overcome. Stanford’s Crowd Research Collective is currently designing a “self-governed crowdsourcing marketplace” dubbed Daemo at present, and this could be implemented as a competing platform. Another competitor that is not mentioned is AI and Machine Learning. If there is a system that provides financial incentive to workers and verifiers for menial tasks, a clever individual could hack the system and use bots on certain GEMS projects. This system has a verification system built into it, but it is a human-designed system (which is prone to errors), and some tasks are very menial. Machine Learning is advancing at a rapid pace, and is already able to do some of the tasks that this mechanical turk platform expects humans to perform, e.g. completing surveys, transcribing documents, captioning photos, sorting documents, flagging copyright or inappropriate content.

Market

Since there's no business plan, the reviewer did a search to see if there is a market for these types of menial tasks. Various sources indicate that there are at least 500 000 MTurk workers using Amazon’s platform. Most earn less than $5 per hour and are geographically concentrated in US colleges, India, and various Asian countries. These are workers who have access to the internet for hours at a time. The use cases that the project team are looking to tackle sound viable and worth pursuing. See this article on the types of initiatives that the team are considering sponsoring for their beta-testing phase.

Economics

GEMS can be summarised as a gig-economy job board, where an employer can recruit multiple workers to perform menial tasks; verifiers ensure that the work is of high quality; escrow and a staking and review system is built-in to ensure both employers and workers are protected. Due to the decentralised nature and use of an off-chain GEMS payment system (unknown where this physically resides as the technical architecture is unclear) that only persists groups of transactions to the Ethereum blockchain, considerable cost efficiencies are realised.

It’s a platform that connects workers (who can perform menial tasks) to employers (who want to pay minimum wage in the form of GEMS tokens). Once the solution goes-live and the value of a GEMS token is determined (based on lower fees, and pegged in fiat terms relative to what employers’ pay on competitors platforms), there should not be much room for the GEMS token to fluctuate in value. Perhaps GEMS token price inflation in line with minimum wage increases on a global scale?

Conclusion

On the Telegram channel, there are members who explicitly state that this is not a crypto coin for investment. The GEMS project has a high number of Telegram users because people are currently interested in being on the ICO pre-sale whitelist or want to partake in the alpha-test bounty program for tokens. The GEMS project is great because it benefits the community of MTurk workers and reduces costs to the employers. However, the reviewer only sees this project as being a good social cause.

Review written by Zaid Mahomedy, CTO and Enterprise Transformation Architect at Blockchain Advisory. Zaid has extensive experience working as a Solution Architect on legacy and newer cloud-based enterprise technologies; preparing as-is, transition and target architectures and experimenting with new technologies (VR.MR/AR, IoT, Blockchain, Big Data, chatbots, etc.)

Email: zaid@blockchainadvisory.co.za



