Join the Gems ICO whitelist now – more details at the end of this post.

What is Gems?

Gems is a decentralized platform for contracting workers to perform micro tasks – typically for companies. It’s a platform competing directly with the likes of Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower.

Although both Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower have been wildly successful with exponential revenue growth since their inception, they also have some key problems. Firstly, they charge high fees – in some cases up to 40%. Second, they require redundancy of tasks in order to achieve a sufficient level of trust in the completion of micro-tasks. Finally, these are centralized platforms – with all the problems that this entails.

Gems leverages the incentive mechanisms that blockchain technology enables, and in a clever way lets works stake tokens in order to prove validity of their tasks. This is a great example of how blockchain technology can solve the problem of trust between two parties.

The first main area that Gems is focusing on is labeling data for deep learning – a field within machine learning and artificial intelligence which has been hugely successful in advancing solutions for problems such as natural language processing and image recognition.

Who’s behind Gems?

Gems’ core team consists of brothers Rory and Kieran O’Reilly. Both are Harvard dropouts – Rory studied psychology and economics, while Kieran studied computer science. After dropping out of Harvard, they went on to found gifs.com – a popular website for making gifs. They’ve both been listed as “30 under 30” for consumer tech by Forbes. Furthermore, the O’Reilly brothers are Thiel Fellows. As you might know, another notable Thiel Fellow in the crypto space is Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

The advisor team has plenty of experience from well-known tech companies, as well as from crypto. Biz Stone brings his experience as co-founder of Twitter and Medium. Ben Maurer is co-founder of the by now ubiquitous reCAPTCHA, and he’s now at Facebook. In addition, Gems has three well-known crypto founders in their advisors team: Joey Krug (Augur; Pantera Capital), Luis Cuende (Aragon; Stampery), and Joe Urgo (district0x; Sourcerers).

What utility does the GEM token have?

According to Gems’ whitepaper, the GEM token has multiple utilities, the two most notable being:

Off-chain micro payments on the platform between micro-task workers and companies Staking of tokens by workers to ensure trust in quality of micro-task completion

How can I participate in the Gems ICO?

Details for the Gems ICO have not yet been announced, but in this post, Gems’ co-founder Rory O’Reilly explains how you can earn your spot in the Gems pre-sale. The instructions to note are:

Join the Gems Telegram Help Gems grow, e.g. doing one of the following: invite people to the Gems Telegram write a blog post make a youtube video drive constructive discussions in the Telegram and beyond your own innovative idea Let Gems know how you helped in this form.

This setup is quite similar to Quantstamp‘s “proof-of-care”, which generated a lot of attention for Quantstamp’s ICO.

Gems’ pre-sale metrics have not yet been published, but make sure you follow the above process before January 8th to be able to participate in the Gems pre-sale.

Our Verdict

Gems has received an extreme amount of hype, and with a very solid team (incl. advisors), plus a great use case for a blockchain solution, we tentatively rate Gems as a Stellar ICO. The financial details are yet to be announced, but unless there’s anything out of the ordinary on hard cap and token allocation, we’ll stick to this verdict.