🌍 Read in 🇪🇸 Español 🇷🇺 Русский

The year 2017 saw 882 successful ICOs. They collected $5.9 billion and made 4,700 promises in their white papers, almost one half of them scheduled for 2018.

Since the very first days, ChronoBank team concentrated its attention not only on developing economical and sustainable smart contracts but on discovering the most efficient way to use the blockchain technology in the field of labour and employment. The team works in close cooperation with the best-recruiting specialists an almost all the continents, with leading analytical centres and research groups working in the field. Today we will share with you several observations related to the promotion of ChronoBank’s solutions.

Even nowadays, when visiting blockchain summits and conferences, when reading social media and industry websites, one can encounter a naive, somewhat romantic notion that decentralisation is marking the end of centralisation and blockchain is marking the end of traditional networks. However, life most evidently suggests an entirely different solution. In most cases, new solutions complement old ones instead of negating them. Thereupon, one of the most important issues of the future of blockchain technologies is to understand what are the fields and markets where they will show the maximum efficiency and outdo the existing centralised solutions.

Here are the conclusions made by ChronoBank and research teams of several leading world universities:

Fragmented Markets

Over the last five years, the fields of B2B and B2C saw the temporary triumph of the platforms. Most unicorns everyone knows about such as Uber and AirBnB are platforms based on principles of joint economy and mobilisation of partly free resources. However, the future is not a direct continuation of the present. Blockchain solutions have to find something essentially new. To answer this question — where to find something essentially new? — let us look at the platforms once again. A large majority of platforms are responsible for up to 10% of economic activity in developed countries, are oriented towards universal, mass services. No matter what field we address, the platforms address the mass consumer and large groups of people able to render the same services in one or another sphere. It is thanks to the mass character and similarity of producers and consumers that the platforms are able, analysing big data, to make them contact each other in a most efficient way and use it to get revenue.

However, as the turbulence and the inequality of the social and the economic development grow, the tendency towards a fragmentation of markets becomes ever more obvious. Everywhere on the planet, a growing number of small fragmented markets is emerging, unique for their region but similar to other such markets everywhere in the world. The fragmented markets, relatively small if taken one by one but huge on the global scale, are the most suitable ones for the blockchain technology.

Let’s illustrate it with the following case: It seems that universal job portals are absolutely successful when finding cleaning or reparation workers etc. Yes, it is true — but only in our traditional, long-standing world. The situation is very different in the case of “Smart” cities and areas. They are not yet very numerous but they are growing in number every day. At present moment, the global number of workers of mass professions oriented towards smart housing is not anymore in the order of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands; it is in the order of the millions. In the high-tech sphere, even the workers of the simplest professions need specific competences. They must satisfy rigorous requirements of responsibility and honesty.

One of the primary fields of ChronoBank activity is the recruiting of workers of mass traditional professions for the developing fragmented markets.

Workers are in a more privileged position than employers

Most current services, portals and the like for B2B and B2C are oriented towards the classical business logic based on the idea of the balance of markets. This idea has until recently been the ‘sacred cow’ of economists and management gurus. However, during the last years it became obvious that imbalanced markets in modern world are a norm, not pathology. Therefore, the solutions that can be efficient in the situation of the long market imbalance become ever more in demand. For instance, in the field of the recruitment, the developing solutions for the markets of sellers are very strongly sought-for. Traditional job portals part from the assumption that the labour supply and the labour demand, different at any given moment of time, are roughly equal on average and, consequently, employed and employers have more or less equal positions. The whole business logic of the international job portals is built upon this assumption.

However, in the quick world, while a significant portion of traditional labour markets survives, the number and percentage of markets increases where the workers are in a more privileged position than employers. It happens because in the spheres marked by exponential growth there is always an unsatisfied demand for responsible and efficient professionals with a high level of competences. According to the research of leading consulting firms, the employing companies are currently unable to fill more than 60–70% full-time vacancies of blockchain developers and programmers. If we take into account project employment and temporary employment, the gap would grow even more. The number of such professions and the scope of the deficit grow day and night and become more and more diverse.

The traditional business logic of recruitment is unable to help the employer. However, blockchain solutions, using smart contracts, flexible ways of stimulating the responsibility, completing the juridical solutions by algorithmically defined procedures and the like, make it possible to find a solution. ChronoBank is active in this area.

Personal data

Over the last three or four years, it became obvious that the data in general and the personal data, in particular, are the petroleum of the digital economy, its principal asset. This data and the algorithms of it development rather than servers or fiber optical cables is the main asset of the most expensive companies of the planet. The awareness of this fact gave rise to a powerful countertrend in the society. The data owners started to look for the ways to get their data back. This problem is also highly relevant in the recruiting industry. Job portals became owners of millions and millions of personal data files, highly relevant, trustworthy and recent. It became known relatively recently that IT companies owning data, search systems, social networks and headhunting portals not only use this data to improve the work efficiency or show targeted advertisements but also sell it underhand to the data brokers. While this situation does not trouble the workers of mass professions that do not have a strong link with IT technologies, and they are not very disturbed because of having lost control of their personal data, the young people, those with higher education and those employed in high-tech industry try to use every opportunity to get back the ownership of their data. That is why they participate most willingly and enthusiastically in projects that replace traditional centralised systems of services with decentralized ones.

LaborX platform creates a possibility to give people back their data, in the same way offering themselves and their employers premium recruiting services.

Reputation role

The globalisation and the ubiquity of information technologies rendered the sphere of employment more diverse than ever. Today workers can choose office or work remotely, favour a local or a transnational group, permanent or temporary employment, project or partial work. The organisation of labour and management becomes more flexible and complicated at the same time. It is easy to manage the workers when they are physically under your eyes and within your reach. According to the data of leading audit firms, the traditional employment will lose its positions more and more. In such conditions, the role of reputation — both of the worker and the employer — becomes ever more important.

A precise and objective assessment of the reputation becomes one of the key factors of survival and prosperity of the business and, at the same time, one of the main components of the social and economic capital of every professional. The problem of reputation already appeared in the traditional economics. Currently, it is mostly solved by creation of different websites where workers, some of them anonymous, can leave their feedback on employers. In their turn, job portals give employers a possibility to leave their comments on workers that look for vacancies and leave their CVs in open access. Everyone is aware of the fact that websites of references to the employers are often used for dishonest competition and largely contain irrelevant information. In the same vein, employers often feel resentment against highly professional and responsible workers that changed their place of work and leave disparaging comments that are largely out of touch with reality.

Finally, the reputation is measured by deeds, not by words.

Therefore, the apparition of special smart contracts that automatically define main obligations of workers and employers makes it possible to give an unbiased assessment. ChronoBank is actively working to that end, and conducts research to solve the problem of development of reputation based on the actual situation.

Robot employment market 🤖

It is not a secret that at present — and, apparently, it is not going to change in the nearest future — that even the user level work with blockchain technologies requires a specific skill. That is why blockchain technologies face less hindrance when coming to new markets as compared with the traditional ones. It is on the new markets that the decentralised solutions show exponential growth.

Simple example: While the robots replace human workers increasingly often, there is no robot employment market where one could hire them. Such a market will obviously emerge within the next few years.

There is nothing fantastic anymore about the creation of a robot employment market where they would be leased, temporarily hired or else.

There are probably other fields where the blockchain technologies can be used most efficiently on already existing or emerging markets. However, it is especially important for the blockchain community to concentrate its efforts in 2018 on executing all the promises and the obligations given to the people during the ICOs.