Two startups want to combine two of the hottest buzzwords of 2018 — blockchain and artificial intelligence — to help blockchain companies and freelance tech workers find one another.

Recently, Singapore-based Indorse, which describes itself as a decentralized professional social network, teamed up with blockchain talent marketplace DREAM (originally known as Moneo), which is based in Gibraltar.

Indorse’s technology allows job seekers to have their work skills validated by “decentralized consensus,” in which other users anonymously judge them. DREAM, meanwhile, uses AI to assemble optimal freelance work teams for blockchain projects. It says its system learns from past projects to accomplish this.

Combating Resume Padding

Although Indorse’s own platform is open to anyone looking for work, its partnership with DREAM focuses on only blockchain freelancers who will be able to create validated professional profiles on both platforms.

With the partnership, DREAM’s AI platform will draw from Indorse’s skills validator, while Indorse will pull ratings and performance data from DREAM.

Validating skills is crucial for blockchain employers, Gaurang Torvekar, co-founder and CEO of Indorse, tells ThirtyK. “Although [someone] can claim to be skilled at a certain thing on their resume or online profile, a lot of due diligence needs to be done in order to understand whether he or she can actually get the job done effectively,” he says. “There have been many cases where people have falsified their resumes or have had a ‘fake it till you make it’ attitude.”

An Anonymous Jury of Peers

Indorse calls its method of identifying and validating skills Anonymous Indorsement Protocol (AIP), wherein the validations are crowd-sourced through an Indorse community of experts.

Although traditional social networks such as LinkedIn ask users to give up their personal data for free, Indorse users who endorse a claim made by another — as long as it is supported by other users — will earn rewards.

“Two main features of AIP are anonymity and randomness, where the claimant won’t even know who is validating him,” Torvekar says. “Every person claiming to possess a certain skill has to be able to prove that he does indeed possess that skill.”

A developer, for example, can do that by providing links to his or her Github codebase, he says, referring to the website where developers collaborate on open-source software. “All the actors in this effort, both the claimant and the validator, get rewarded in the form of indorse (IND) tokens for their activity on the platform,” he says. The company sold the tokens in an August 2017 sale, raising $9 million worth of ether (ETH).