Challenges

Explore the challenges of user authenticity, payment verification, and platform dependency in freelancing, and discover how Web3 technology offers decentralized solutions.

User Authenticity

Freelance is global and it is always about dealing with unknown people but trusting them through a third party is always not a good approach. How will a party know whether they should trust the other party or not? It generally ends up trusting the information provided by the third party and there is no way that the user can verify whether the provided information is authentic or not. It’s not even in the hands of third parties to provide a method where the user can verify it.

Consider the following scenario:

• The employer puts a job and there are dozens of freelancers bidding on it and there is no way for the employer to authenticate the freelancer without any third party or vice-versa, They both have to depend on a third party (platform) for it.

  • Is there a way to verify how many jobs the freelancer has done, his history of work, and reviews given by his past employers?

  • How much money the employer has paid to freelancers?

  Can all the above be verified without depending on a third party (platform)?

That’s why there needs to be a trustless way to verify the information.

Payments

Payment lives at the center of every job but the challenge is they are mostly controlled by external parties and can’t be linked with rules defined in the agreement contract. The agreement contract and payments are separate due to their technical architecture so it doesn’t matter what terms and conditions are mentioned in the agreement, the payments can never be enforced according to them without interference from a third party.

Freelancers need to be assured when using escrow services that it will be unbiased and payments will be released according to the agreement but due to the involvement of third parties and platform rules it’s not always that easy and the freelancer can’t do anything if something goes wrong.

Platform Dependency

The first step to getting into freelancing is to join a freelancing platform but apart from their terms there are some other challenges that users will be facing such as data being locked inside the servers of the platform, so they can’t use it anywhere else. If users need to switch to another platform, share their work and experience, or showcase it on their personal website or social media, the third-party platform is the only place they can redirect. Users are spending their precious time and skills on these third-party platforms and they can’t own a single piece of their data.

In summary, From creating an account to defining skills to handling the payments, for everything users need to trust the third-party platform. These problems are not only with the existing web2 platforms they extend to the so-called web3-based platforms because 90% of application architecture is still centralized and the process is still the same but “web3 tech has allowed changing this whole thing”.