California and India-based ICO SpringRole has announced what it describes as an “enormous response” to its pre-sale. Over 3,200 interested investors have been whitelisted from over 30 countries, and its Telegram group has now climbed through the 60k barrier. .

SpringRole CEO Kartik Mandaville set out to solve what he describes as “an all-too-real problem faced by every offshore company hiring in India,” i.e. how do you know that potential employees have the skills and experience they claim to have?

LinkedIn and other professional networking sites suffer from the difficulties inherent in checking user information – anyone can claim to be an expert on any topic, and verifying those claims is both expensive and time-consuming.

Authenticity Focus

In the SpringRole platform “attestors” – those who vouch for the skill and experience of others – are paid for their contributions in the platform’s native SPRING tokens. Once a user has been attested for a particular skill or experience, the information is recorded onto the blockchain. Users can then effectively expose their references to whom they accord the right to view them, without the need for repeated verifications for each new employment application.

Early investor and CEO of Science, Inc, Mike Jones, described the project as “one of the first practical consumer-grade applications for the blockchain,” and one which “brings authenticity to professional social networks for the first time.”

The service is currently available in beta version and has become one of the first apps on the Ethereum mainnet with more than 17,000 users. The project has set itself a hard cap of $12 million, with minimum contributions fixed at 10 ETH.