Braintrust Blog | The Future of Work.

Growth Report #30: Proving the Case for Decentralization.

Written by Braintrust Technology Foundation | Dec 13, 2021 10:53:09 PM

🎉 Before you jump into the November Growth Report, did you see the great news? Braintrust announced the private purchase of $100M of BTRST by Coatue, Tiger Global Fund, and other early backers to fuel community-led innovation! Get the scoop here.

🎤 Founders speak up.

Braintrust co-founders Adam Jackson and Gabe Luna-Ostaseski shared their thoughts as we closed out a successful Q3. Hear their personal highlights, what they’re excited about on Braintrust, and a few challenges the network faced last quarter in the most recent founder update:

If you prefer reading, you can catch these updates in their founder letter.

 

💸 Talent earnings.

Braintrust’s Gross Service Value (GSV) is a special statistic: It shows how much you, the Talent, have made on the network. In 18 months, that tally adds up to a pretty spectacular $28.2M (compare that to the sales volume of the highest grossing projects on the Web3 Index… it’s exponentially higher).


That’s an incredible number, with GSV increasing more than 2,000% from $1.2M in early 2020. And we’re just getting started.

 

💸 Client updates.

The total number of jobs posted to the Braintrust platform.

Clients were busy in November! The network surpassed 1,800 jobs posted to the platform. Teams all over the world are heading to Braintrust for their hiring needs, with jobs ranging from blockchain engineering to UX/UI design to copywriting and more.


The hiring market may be tough out there, but it’s smooth sailing on Braintrust. Just check out a few of the brands who hired on Braintrust in November:


🦄 Network growth.

The total number of Talent who have signed up for Braintrust.


Braintrust saw a major influx of Talent sign ups in November. Almost 3,000 new Talent applied to join! This user-owned talent network is growing at remarkable rates, and it’s just further confirmation that Talent are tired of the extractive tactics of traditional hiring.


They’re ready for Braintrust!


🏛 Network infrastructure.

User-owned and controlled. Decentralized. Community-led. Built in public. Open Sourced. These are all core traits of the Braintrust network. And thanks to some major work done on the platform in November, many more community members will soon be able to build the network's open source technical infrastructure through a grant bidding process.

To get there, Braintrust has been working to:

  • Establish code conventions.
  • Conducting security tests.
  • Figure out how to plug into CI/CD infrastructure.
  • Write documentation for the tech stack and API.
  • Create standards around the Braintrust brand application.

The first community-led product project focuses on building an open-source ticketing system, and it is almost ready to launch!

 

🖨 Hot off the presses.

"#Web3 applications are wresting market share from centralised incumbents.


Braintrust, a Web3 talent marketplace that incentivizes participants with tokens ... is gaining ground on public competitors such as Upwork."


There is more to crypto than just financial applications. As a member of the Braintrust network, you know that. So do Web3 thought leaders Chris Dixon and Packy McCormick, who recently wrote about the future of Web3 in The Economist, and gave a shoutout to Braintrust!


Other places you might’ve noticed Braintrust in November:

 

👪 Community spotlight.

 

Talent are the heart and soul of Braintrust. And in November, they shared their stories about how Braintrust has changed their lives!


Vivek, who is making 5x his previous rate on Braintrust and finally gets to live in his hometown and spend quality time with family thanks to finding work on Braintrust.


Lida, who takes pride in owning her work relationships and accessing interesting, high-quality jobs with great brands while freelancing on Braintrust.


Anthony, who not only loves his work, but also loves who he gets to work with while contracting with Fortune 1000 companies like Porsche on Braintrust.


The community has had some major triumphs in November:


💻 Product improvements.

By now, everyone knows that you don’t have to be in the same office for a team to work well together. Remote work works. The task now is to get more companies comfortable with the fact that you also don’t have to be in the same time zone.

In November, Product shipped an incredibly important feature: Working hours. This means clients can specify which hours of the day candidates would need to be available for a certain job. This will make it easier for Talent to see where there is overlap in their preferred work hours, and will open up even more opportunities to hire and get hired.

 

🤝 How to get involved:

There’s a lot happening on Braintrust, and there are tons of ways you can get involved and help build this growing network:

 

🚩 Challenges:

  1. Revamped the community incentive structure to align community leader rewards with what makes the most sense with this stage of Braintrust growth.
  2. Battled bot & DDOS attacks on the product. Thankfully, these attacks on the product did not do any real damage, but it did require a significant amount of troubleshooting and developer attention to wrangle these bad actors.
  3. Managed the influx of questions and support requests after the BTRST launch and listing on Coinbase. The community was suddenly flooded with emails, Discord pings, and social media mentions from people around the world looking for more information. And while this is fantastic to see this level of interest, the level of interest was definitely greater than anticipated.