Today, many workers are quitting their regular 9-5 jobs. The reasons for which they are resigning vary from one worker to another. Indeed, every worker who has quit his job today has a concern that spurred him into that action. Because they have left their jobs, they become self-reliant just to keep wolves from the doors. But before long, they would learn about freelancing. Essentially, freelancing offers them a rare opportunity to use their problem-solving dexterities to eke out a living, telecommuting at their pace. But does this eventually bring to an end their work-related concerns? Not really!
CHALLENGES OF FREELANCING
Basically, there are three daunting challenges freelancers are faced with in the world of gig/sharing economy. Let’s look at them critically.
High commission rates: Just like paid employment, freelancing throws a plethora of challenges at workers. Well, one of them is high commission rates charged by their “employers.” These employers or platforms are modeled to appear super attractive as the freelancers don’t need to go looking for clients to work for. Yes, most times, those freelancers with attractive portfolios and remarkable project-completion-success rate already have series of projects waiting to be executed. But this doesn’t happen without some credit going to the platform. The reason is simply that the team behind the platform is entitled to certain percentages of the freelancer’s earnings, ranging from 20% to 50%. Take, for instance, while Fiverr charges 22.9%, Upwork slashes 12.7% to 22.7% off their freelancers’ earnings.
Huge marketing and advertising costs: Apart from the high commission rates that these self-employed workers deal with each time they successfully deliver a project or complete a transaction, they also have huge marketing and advertising costs as another difficulty to wrestle with. For acting as information aggregators, the platforms compel the freelancer to pay for their efforts. In all fairness to these platforms, a quick peep at how major online platforms bill their clients shows that Google AdWords and Facebook Ad are $2.32 and $1.72 on pay per click average respectively. Not to mention that an average small business spends over $9,000 per month on Google AdWords and nearly $120,000 per annum on digital marketing. Are these fees enough justification for their exorbitant advertising charges? Well, don’t be hasty in judging them because we aren’t done yet!
No employment benefits: Well, if you ever think the woes that freelancers face are over, you have another thing coming. In the gig/sharing ecosystem, there are no work benefits: pension, paid time-off, retirement plan, gratuity, health benefits, medical benefits, you name it! How do these freelancers justify that they are working for a robust employer anyway?
SOLUTIONS
Blue Whale Foundation is suggesting a framework to change the terrible freelancers’ narratives. The platform will launch on the blockchain. And the strategy is perfected in a way so as to take care of the key problems we discussed earlier. So, here is the breakdown of how Blue Whale Foundation plans to tackle them.
Contribution Activity Manager: To kick high commission rates into obsolescence, Blue Whale Foundation will employ a program called Contribution Activity Manager (CAM). The idea behind CAM is to reward individuals who help to drive traffic to freelancers and small businesses by tracking their activities. With this end in view, everyone on the platform is made to become an advertiser.
Decentralized Associated Networks: Furthermore, to effectively solve the problem of huge marketing and advertising costs, Blue Whale Foundation is employing SaaS tools such as customer relationship management and intelligent advertising solution to create a new ad framework based on cycle of consumer data mining and machine learning, thus redistributing insights and rewards among the stakeholders. This is called Decentralized Associated Network (DAN).
Reward Bank: Well, the Reward Banks or ReBa is the bank that receives and shares rewards (in coins) to all the beneficiaries in the network. With the aid of CAM and DAN, ReBa rewards beneficiaries who have contributed immensely to the network.
HOW IT WORKS
Although the emphasis thus far has been on freelancers, Blue Whale Network is also developed to capture small business owners. Let’s look at the plans.
• Referrals/Rewards: If freelancer A attracts client C to the network. And C buys a product from freelancer B, A will have 5% bonus, 5% goes to the system and B keeps the rest.
• Verification: Freelancers are verified independently by community members and matched to customers upon registration. New freelancers are made to undergo verification after completing 50 tasks. On a scale of 5, if a freelancer rates below 4.0, then the freelancer is made to undergo another verification process. Freelancers who passed will be promoted to verifiers but not without a fee of 2% service value. In clear terms, verification cost is $4.
• Arbitration: Whenever there’s a dispute between a freelancer and a client, both parties can request for arbitration. The dispute is resolved by a Council. To be a Council jury, you must have completed 100 tasks and with a rating of at least 4.9.
OVERVIEW
• The Blue Whale Foundation’s blockchain network is also known as WORK (Worker Optimizer Reward Keeper) system
• It is developed to solve the problems facing freelancers and small business owners.
• Transactions will be performed using its token called BWX (Blue Whale Exchange)
• The system has smart contracts which enable all the functionalities
• WORK system is a blockchain which will allow many dApps (decentralized apps) to interact with it). And these dApps can perform transactions using BWX
• Built to be transparent, Blue Whale Network will have nodes monitoring transactions in the network, which are generated when work is promoted or validated.
LAST WORDS
The Blue Whale Network is a must join because it is truly a decentralized network that leaves power in the hands of freelancers and small business owners. Also, the network is designed to be transparent, thus boosting freelancers’ confidence in it. With statistics suggesting that freelancers will make up 58% of US economy in 2027, Blue Whale Network has developed the robust network to give them a very bright future unlike what they experience today. To learn more visit the links below.
Website – https://www.bluewhale.foundation
Whitepaper – https://www.bluewhale.foundation/assets/Bluewhale_White_Paper_ENG_V.pdf
Telegram – https://t.me/bluewhalefdn
Twitter – https://twitter.com/BlueWhaleFdn
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/bluewhalefoundation/
Writer - Coltpython
