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ICO Alert Quick Facts
- Peer-to-peer Freelance system
- 1 ETH = 1,000 ERT token
- February 28, 2018 — March 31, 2018
- 30,000,000 total available / 40,000,000 total supply
- Minimal Viable Product currently Live
What is Ethearnal?
Ethearnal is peer-to-peer (P2P) freelance system, in which employers and freelancers meet, enter into trustless smart contracts with reputation and money in escrow, and take advantage of a decentralized system of moderators, if needed. We collide reputation and economic initiatives into one by tokenizing reputation and giving it value. Thus, all parties, moderators included, have strong and aligned initiatives to act honestly, since everyone has something of value at stake, as well as something to gain if the desired outcome is achieved.
— Stanislav Uzunchev | CEO
ICO Alert: How does the Ethearnal Token (ERT) function within the platform and why is it needed?
Ethearnal: ERT has a few major functions that make the Ethearnal platform possible.
The more reputation tokens (ERT) you have, the more visibility you have in the network. By default the search engine sorts by reputation. While on other sites you start with no reputation, with us you can jump start your career by buying some. That doesn’t allow you to game the system though, because you stake some of it with every contract you enter and you can lose that stake if you behave maliciously. Those game theory based initiatives naturally filter out the bad actors and reward the good ones by increasing their reputation even more on successfully completed projects. You can’t be banned, but if your behavior is not in line, you lose reputation and the system naturally filters you out. Also you are not locked in with us, you can transfer your reputation at any time or even cash it out if you decide you don’t want to work anymore. Tokenizing reputation and giving it value gives everyone major flexibility. We truly believe that’s the way of the future!
You can use our token to earn money as moderator! This is another key part of our system: decentralizing the moderation process. The moderators, just like the other actors need to stake reputation that ensures the honesty of their actions. This is the other key component that allows the system to be self regulating and self sufficient. Once it gets enough traction it won’t need us, the founders, to function.
The 3rd key function is using the ERT token for the DAO related functions. As far as we know we are the first ICO whose team is not guaranteed to receive all of the money , but just 10% and for every next 10% increment the token holders have to vote if we should get it or not. This keeps us accountable. Also, the token holders get proportionally to their token holdings the 1% fee the system collects from disputes. For this whole system to work the token needs to have value, a big part of that value comes from the people holding it because they see it as valuable. So, we think it’s only fair if those people get something back in return.
ICO Alert: How do employers and freelancers interact within the platform? Can you take us through a specific use case?
Ethearnal: You just fire up the web app and find a suitable gig or freelancer. You can also post your own offer if you prefer people to find you. Once you found your guy, you enter into a smart contract with the job value in Ether and reputation at stake from each side in escrow. Once the work is done, if both parties are happy, they finalize the smart contract on their own. The freelancers get 99% of the Ether from escrow. Both of users then get their staked reputation back. 1% of the contract value is used by ERT on the free market and distributed equally among the employer and freelancer. That ensures they get reputation proportional to the contract value.
If either side is unhappy he can open a dispute. When that happens, a pool of moderators align and decide the outcome by simple majority (they have initiatives on their own but there is more about that in the whitepaper at https://ethearnal.com/ethearnal-whitepaper.pdf).
ICO Alert: A prime function within the Ethearnal ecosystem is the reputation system. Can you outline how this system works?
Ethearnal: Both sides of a contract get reputation proportional to the contract value when the project is successfully completed by mutual agreement. 1% of the contract value is used to buy ERT on the free market and 0.5% is given back to each side as reputation.
When there is dispute, there is 1 more side involved: a pool of moderators (every token holder can work as a moderator). The pool of moderators collectively stake the same amount of reputation as each side of the contract.
When the dispute is concluded:
The winning side gets the contract value from escrow, his staked rep back, and the rep of the minority voted mods.
The losing side loses only his staked rep if the freelancer and the staked rep AND the money in escrow is for the employer.
The majority vote mods get proportionally to their stakes the rep of the losing side.
The minority vote mods lose their reputation at stake to the winning side.
For more complicated projects when binary outcomes are not enough, milestones can be used.
ICO Alert: What separates Ethearnal from other freelance ecosystems that have already been launched?
Ethearnal: ICO 2.0, Fully Autonomous and decentralized, AI. Democratic. No profit taking. The only fees of 0% to 1% go back to the system to align the initiatives of all parties involved.
The other current projects, are not truly decentralized.The community (all ERT holders) can vote and take the decisions. The other projects we have seen are centralized by hosting, or team. The only part that is related with blockchain are the smart contracts, and they are not so advanced to take the full potential of the technology. The system we propose is self-sufficient and self-regulating. It can thrive on it’s own without us and we have not implemented any profit vectors for us. We profit just like any other token holder.
Also we have seen only a few projects use AI, we plan to have millions of users on the platforms and it needs to be really scalable and self sustainable. We are going to use OpenAI in the search engine and other features of Ethearnal.
ICO Alert: What are the benefits of becoming a moderator and what function do they play within Ethearnal?
Ethearnal: You can more than double your staked rep tokens every time you participate in a winning decision. Since every side has the same amount of tokens at stake and you get proportionally the tokens of the losing side. If your staked tokens represent 10%, you get them back plus another 10% from the losing side of the dispute (not the losing group of moderators). However, since this is distributed only among the moderators who voted with the majority, your percent actually increases.
Example:
The rep tokens needed at stake are 100. There are 10 moderators in the moderators pool, each participating with 10 tokens. (This is highly unlikely, but we are just keeping the math simple.) So, your tokens represent 10% of the pool. 70% of the moderators have voted for one of the sides, 30% for the other. You have voted with the majority (70%). Since only they get tokens, we now have 70 tokens among which to proportionally distribute the losing sides’ tokens. Your 10 tokens now represent 14,28% of that. So you get 24.28 tokens back for your originally staked 10. That is a 142% profit.
If you happen to be on the losing side, you lose 100%. So, moderators have a strong initiative to judge honestly, but the gains more often than not outweigh the potential for a loss.
We know how difficult it is to support on high volume websites today. For example on exchanges, and other freelancing sites. To cope with that problem and keep our system self sustainable, we invented this feature, more users means more potential moderators and more money for them to be made by moderating. Kinda like Ethereum and Gas price. So even with millions of users there will be enough moderators to keep the system going.
ICO Alert: You currently have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for users to interact with, what has been the initial reaction from the community?
Ethearnal: So far people really like it. You can follow up the development at https://github.com/Ethearnal/ or monitor our live demo at http://138.68.100.241:7890/ui/
We have developed strong p2p protocol and a really fast search engine. That is rare in p2p projects.
ICO Alert: What is the current state of the freelancing industry, and what does the expected growth look like over the next five years?
Ethearnal: It’s a huge market. According to a Forbes study the market was valued at about $1.5 trillion in 2016 and the trend is only going up.
ICO Alert: How far along is the project today and when can contributors expect to use the platform? What does the roadmap look like for 2018?
Ethearnal: We will have working product by the end of the year. We don’t plan to work for years before releasing something “perfect”. Rather we prefer to release early and integrate often. To create the best product, you have to work with the best experts. There is a lot of mathematics, algorithms, AI research, and we will need a big dedicated team just for that.
ICO Alert: As a non-Ethearnal question we like to ask for unique predictions for the ICO and cryptocurrency space in the future. Where do you see both in the next 3–5 years?
Ethearnal: We think it’s about time for the second wave of ICOs, ICO 2.0 or as Vitalik called it DAICO. Most current projects will fail and there will be no responsibility taken. Unfortunately that is often the case with the first wave of things. Actually one of our co-founders wrote an article about just that. https://medium.com/@Ethearnal_com/is-it-time-for-ico-2-0-or-we-should-wait-for-the-shit-to-hit-the-fan-6417f7ce9abe
We are quite happy to be one of the first of this second wave of more mature ICOs.
ICO Information
The ICO will begin on February 28, 2018 and will end on March 31, 2018. There are a total of 30,000,000 Ethearnal tokens (ERT) available during the ICO period, representing 75%% of the total ERT supply. A hard cap of 30,000 ETH is set for this period.
1 ETH = 1,000 ERT token
Current accepted currencies for Ethearnal include ETH.
Ethearnal is an ERC-20 token, so it’s important that contributors use ERC-20 compatible wallets to send funds to the ICO smart contract, and to receive the Ethearnal tokens.
Token Distribution Information
There are a total 40,000,000 ERT tokens being created, with 30,000,000 available during main ICO.
Upon completion of the ICO, the smart contract automatically distributes the tokens to contributors, and 10% of the collected funds to the Ethearnal Team. Visit the Ethearnal website for more information and the contribution address.
Allocation
Roadmap
Team
Social Media
Facebook
Medium
Twitter
Telegram
Reddit
BitcoinTalk [ANN]
View the Ethearnal website here.
View the only comprehensive list of active and upcoming Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) here.
References
- Ethearnal Website, Ethearnal (2018)
https://ethearnal.com/ - Ethearnal Whitepaper, Ethearnal (2018)
https://ethearnal.com/ethearnal-whitepaper.pdf
Source: ICO Alert
