Braintrust’s Founders on How to Run a Decentralised Marketplace

Braintrust serves the increasing demand for freelancers - they can aggregate the demand because it's a no-fee model. We can finally unbundle the trillions of dollars in the W2 stack.

Braintrust focused on product/market fit and network transactions before going into Ethereum mainnet. Many projects don't go further than a white paper whereas Braintrust built supply and demand early and then went through the process of bringing things on chain.

Will all marketplaces become decentralized, issue tokens, and enable users to participate in governance? Maximally extractive folks will be disrupted first. Airbnb looks the same in 10 years because they provide as much value as they extract. But people hate Upwork so there is a strong incentive to disintermediate. Knowledge work marketplaces are s... See more

Braintrust does have a revenue model in the form of taking a % - they take 10% from employers. The innovation here is replace the middleman with software and use a token to incentivize community behavior like inviting talent, inviting clients. Braintrust doesn't spend $ on marketing - the core innovation is taking cost of acquisition to zero by giv... See more

How are people reacting to token model? There is everything - speculators, people who care about governance, but interestingly the vast majority of people aren't earning tokens as part of their primary income so the tokens are "icing" which is why many just accumulate.

Tokens are icing on the cake - freelancers can show up and earn 40% more than traditional marketplaces. Braintrust has abstracted away crypto brain damage. Nike is a client and they don't know or need to know they are interacting with a crypto network.

It's a flaw in a token economy if you are using your governance token and utility token as a payment layer. If you are being paid for your time on something, assume it will be converted to USD because people can't live off crypto today. With Braintrust, the token is a reward incentive mechanism, not a native form of payment for the work done on the... See more

Technological innovation to enable this has already occurred - business model innovation powered by a technical innovation (tokens) - and now the future just has to catch up.

The referral engine for Braintrust is a permissionless system - anyone that shows up and brings talent or clients to the network can be rewarded in BTRUST tokens. There is no cash comp in the referral engine, but various core teams get paid in cash.

How it works: There is an off-chain layer with a platform wallet. This is all automated - if you make a referral the system grants you tokens automatically.