I’m very excited to present our new feature on Ethlance. It’s something that can be hardly seen on traditional freelance platforms, but thanks to the Ethereum blockchain, new possibilities are emerging.

People involved in non-profits and community projects can now create jobs that are allowed to accept donations from sponsors. This will make communities more effective at coordinating funds into important tasks.

Let’s see how it looks in practice.

When creating a new job, check toggle to accept sponsorships. Now you have to choose authorized addresses that will be allowed to spend funds from sponsors. These addresses will be in charge of evaluating whether work was properly done and therefore they’ll be paying freelancer’s invoices.

Note, not even job creator himself has to be allowed to spend funds. Job creator can be somebody who’s willing to spend free time for community to coordinate job (do hiring, communication, etc.), but not necessarily have to be expert in the field to be able to check freelancer’s work (e.g check developer’s code).

Before a job can be published, all allowed addresses have to approve it. Job creator can make edits to a job until then. Authorized addresses don’t have to be registered on Ethlance in order to approve. If they are, their name will be displayed instead of address. Green ones are ones who already approved a job.

Right under job post we can see list of sponsors ordered by sponsored amount and form to participate in sponsoring. In order to sponsor, you don’t have to be registered on Ethlance, all you need is MetaMask or Mist or other Ethereum client. Multiple sponsorships from the same address will be added up.

Finally, authorized addresses can pay freelancer’s invoice from raised funds.

When the job is done and there are still leftover funds, no worries, job creator has button to refund all sponsors proportionally.

There’s many ways this feature can be developed further. For example, a job creator could define multi signature rules for authorized addresses about how much funds they can spend. We certainly plan to improve this feature according to user feedback.

We genuinely hope this feature can help various communities to organize themselves better to get important tasks done. If you have a good idea and some time, don’t hesitate to create a job that accepts sponsorships by yourself ;)