1st official DYOR Day at Talent Protocol 🔬

Talent Protocol is creating a set of tools that allow anyone to create, manage and OWN their career community. One of those tools are tokens, that allow builders to have a direct relationship with their true supporters (no intermediary). We’ve been experimenting with ERC-20 tokens for a few months, and are now exploring how Career NFTs could work. Why NFTs? NFTs are (arguably) easier to understand and easier to use than social tokens. NFTs have more mainstream adoption. NFTs have less regulatory problems. NFTs don’t need liquidity. The talent owns all of the NFTs and can offer them (free NFTs) or sell them (to fundraise towards a goal). A Career NFT would work as a membership card or a passport to be part of someone’s “career club”. A permissionless Patreon or Substack. Talent could individually define how many Career NFTs exist, if they’re free or have a price, their expiration dates and, most importantly, what do these NFTs unlock, what benefits you’ll be able to access if you own them. Examples of interesting benefits could be exclusive access (token-gated) to private newsletters or publications (with Mirror), chats on Telegram or Discord (with guild.xyz), Notion pages (with Unlock), events (with Unlock or lu.ma), content (with MintGate) or even a calendar (with cal.com).

We have been feeling for a while now the need to start exploring data privacy, self-sovereign identity and how users at Talent Protocol can own their own data, including their profile data but also their professional social graph.

We’ve deep-dived into Lit Protocol, a Decentralised Access Control for Web3 Apps and Private Data on the Open Webz to understand how viable of a solution it is for this specific need.

There are some very interesting concepts that Lit Protocol is exploring and that we can take advantage of such as:

• Using NFTs for authentication, meaning that our sign-in process could just rely on the user holding an NFT instead of web2 username/email + password
• Locking HTML inside NFTs that only certain wallets can view, essentially creating token gated content
• Lit Protocol already supports a lot of networks, which means that Talent Protocol being on CELO/Polygon isn’t an issue.
• Lit Protocol also integrats with well-known apps (Shopify, Zoom, etc.) This could allow our users to provide Zoom calls and Merchandising stores only to people with their token.

Some of the not so great things that we found all seem to be related to the project still being in its early days:

• Lit Protocol hasn’t yet been audited
• Its team has ownership of all nodes and there’s no clear path to decentralization and how to reward other node runners
• If a user doesn’t use Lit Protocol to create NFTs and wants to integrate with NFTs that they have already created: it’s unclear if there is a lot of value in using their SDK since most things can be achieved without it.

On-chain credentials, also known as DIDs, are a proxy for your knowledge, and they need to establish trust between its owner and whoever you’re trying to show the credential to. These types of credentials mainly rely on three variables: the integrity of the data (it will always exist and can be readable), the quality of the content (the content behind the data should be comprehensive enough) and the reputation of the issuer (how they decide to award those credentials).

On-chain credentials are especially interesting for us, Talent Protocol, as they can become an essential part of someone’s careers and their digital presence. We are working on a User Journey where anyone can show their credentials as part of their professional path, along with their past experiences and, most importantly, their future road map.

We’ve looked into the examples of several on-chain credentials projects such as Project Galaxy, SourceCred, Layer3, GitPOAP and Rabbit Hole, sourcing for inspiration and benchmarks.

I left the lab early and jumped straight to the construction site: at this very first Research Sprint, I focused on reading about ambassador programs in web3 projects such as Chainlink, Polkadot and Aragon — halfway through the research, I was inspired enough to draft the first version of Talent Protocol's Community Ambassadors program, in which you're going to see live real soon (hint: come join me at our Community Call next week 😉). 

I went deep into Lens Protocol and I enjoyed what I saw. Lens was built by the same team at Aave so there’s some accumulated street cred already. I believe that Talent Protocol can be built on top of Lens Protocol and add more specific career components on top of it. Before we make a decision… we need to dig deeper, get some more feedback from builders who already created dapps on top of Lens and make a prototype, maybe for something very simple like a Talent House dapp built on top of Lens? Just shooting ideas 🔫

I believe there's a correlation between the quality of the content in Web3 proejcts and their communities engagement. I've zoomed in on several Web3 projects who are leading the space in terms of community members/following on social media with two objectives: the first to understand how they are building their content and, the second, to identify what questions we should be asking ourselves in Talent Protocol as regards to the content we've been creating so far.

There were 3 major takeaways for me were that we, as a community, need to find better and different analogies to explain the technology and its possibilities to those who are just entering the space; (2) we can explore different incentives to boost community engagement; and (3) that it should be clearer the ratio between product/tech content and other types of content.

Soulbound (non-transferable) tokens are useful for self-expression and/or to show status. It is basically a permanent record of who did what and when. SBTs are non-transferable tokens that represent “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” that make up the social relations on Web3 networks. In other words, they are tokenized representations of the myriad traits, features and achievements that make up a person or entity.

This may become meaningful for people's careers and can be directly correlated to on-chain credentials and career NFTs. It is just a matter of finding the best fit, technology-wise, to bring the best experience to those who want to build their on-chain professional record.