Decentralization

Technical Components

TalentLayer intends to be a fully decentralized at the protocol level. We have composed all TalentLayer Core contracts in a decentralized way from day 1. Below you can explore the few centralized components that exist today; all relating to operations, onboarding, and third-party integrations.

Why Decentralization? How we find and do work is one of the most important aspects of our lives as humans. At TalentLayer, we believe that the most resilient, uncensorable, and accessible systems are user-owned, decentralized, and autonomous. We're architecting our infrastructure and organizational structures in line with this vision. What does that mean for you as a platform? If you build on TalentLayer, you're building on a perpetual protocol that will always be around to help you serve your users.

Centralized Technical Components

TalentLayer Treasury

The TalentLayer Treasury is a multi-sig wallet that receives revenue from protocol fees.

This treasury management will eventually be transitioned to TalentLayer's decentralized governance. Here token holders and those they elect will vote on how to allocate the funds to support TalentLayer's continued development and growth.

Learn more about current fees below.

Fees & Economics

Platform ID Minting Capabilities

The Platform ID smart contract currently allows the contract owner to mint Platform IDs on behalf of platforms. There is currently no way to self-mint Platform IDs. Today, minting is managed by the TalentLayer Team.

This right to mint Platform IDs will eventually be transitioned to TalentLayer's decentralized governance. The community can then decide how to manage approval for platforms.

Learn more about Platform IDs here.

PlatformID

Subgraph Hosting

TalentLayer's subgraph is currently live on on The Graph's Hosted Service (a service hosted by The Graph's team). The Graph is currently undergoing their own decentralization effort, which involves deploying support for more chains and storage systems on The Graph Network (a decentralized protocol).

TalentLayer is in the process of migrating our various subgraphs as The Graph Network deploys support for those networks and maintains sufficient uptime on them to support our platform partner's transactions.

Decentralized Technical Components

All contracts and components not specifically mentioned in the section above are decentralized today - this includes every core smart contract of TalentLayer. This means even if the TalentLayer team was no longer around, the contracts would still run and function as intended according to the specifics of the code and documentation. This is one of the most powerful elements of blockchain technology; it enables "infinite machines" as Vitalik Buterin put it.

Development Operations

Today, TalentLayer is being maintained by a team of open-source developers. TalentLayer was founded by Kirsten and Romain, who coordinate the team. This team manages the TalentLayer treasury and the few centralized components discussed in the prior section.

In the future, once our decentralized governance launches, our development operations will also be decentralized. Token holders and representatives they elect will then have control over treasury and contract management; funding open-source development and growing the protocol as the community votes.

Decentralization Timeline

TalentLayer intends to launch our token and transition contract management to a decentralized organization when we have reached a sufficient number of integrated platforms. We believe this number will be between 20 and 50 platforms, depending on the level these platforms choose to co-create with us. This is because tokenomics and governance design of decentralized systems needs to be crafted with involvement from diverse ecosystem participants; in our case, this includes various types of integrating platforms and their users.

We hope to closely involve our earliest marketplace partners in a process of tokenomics and governance co-creation to ensure that TalentLayer succeeds in it's goal of being a user-owned and governed network.

If you have any questions on our decentralization timeline or where we are now, feel free to get in touch!

💬Contact The Team