Project Title: Non-Custodial Marketplace Platform for Stellar without Fees or Middlemen
Summary:
Easy-to-use non-custodial marketplace platform that lets anyone earn Lumens and other Stellar assets via bounties, services, and jobs while helping to crowdsource Stellar projects.
Goals:
We're trying to create an global p2p gig economy for Stellar. Not only are we the first gig marketplace platform for Stellar, but we're different than the traditional ones. Existing marketplaces charge high fees (20%+ of earnings) and try to be the exclusive middleman between clients and freelancers. For example, they are disallowed by TOS to contact or transact outside the platform. In contrast, Cgig is an open marketplace with no fees. We help match clients with talent and encourage them to communicate however they want to, while enabling the use of Stellar assets as digital cash for their transactions.
Cgig combines the best features of traditional marketplaces to create a truly peer-to-peer commerce hub while leveraging the p2p payment features of Stellar.
Note to reader: We started with a working project (Fiverr marketplace). And since our initial SCF submission, we have added more features and 2 new marketplaces- Job and Bounty. If you're interested to check out how much progress we've made, please scroll down.
High-Level features of Cgig:
- On-Chain, Non-Custodial marketplaces without middlemen.
- Bounty marketplace for all Stellar assets- anyone could earn Lumens or other Stellar assets while helping Stellar projects (e.g. testing, creative design, translation, social media marketing, etc...)
- Fiverr for Stellar- a marketplace where anyone could easily start a shop and sell packaged services (e.g. Logo creation, web design, writing etc...)
- Upwork for Stellar- a job bidding marketplace where anyone could post a job request and bid on job requests with their proposals.
- User portfolio showcasing their projects and skills for prospective clients. Allows clients to contact users for additional types of gigs.
- Create a directory of skilled talents and merchants that accept Stellar assets as payment.
- Uses Stellar assets for direct peer-peer payments.
Description
We've always been fascinated by the possibilities of Stellar assets being used as decentralized cash for peer to peer payments. So we thought it would be good for Stellar to have marketplaces that revolve around Stellar assets. The most obvious type of marketplace that comes to mind is freelancing/crowdsourcing. Other cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum and BCH) already have these and people use them.
Service Marketplace
Bounty Marketplace (Beta started 06/16)
Besides its main marketplaces, Cgig comes with a lot of auxiliary features, including:
- User portfolio showcase
- In-app chat and notifications
- Tipping
- Order management
- Milestone support (for jobs)
- Reviews and ratings
- Federation addresses for payment tracking
We've thought and researched quite a bit on how to make a freelance marketplace concept work for Stellar and decided to first focus on the core, which is helping Stellar users who need skilled help discover those who could provide. Our marketplace is truely peer-to-peer, which means client directly pays freelancer, which also means that freelancer keep 100% of their earnings. In comparison, existing freelance apps take 20% or more of earnings.
We provide different mediums for mutual discovery, which includes gig-based listings, freelancer profiles, and bidding based project postings. We also provide tools like order portfolio showcasing, order estimation, activity monitor, and reviews to facilitate these transactions without being in the way.
We'll be using Keybase to establish for identity proofs. We will also provide a way to associate a Cgig order with a Stellar transaction, which could be referenced by review/feedback left for the freelancer.
We've seen the direct peer to peer model work quite well for small-medium sized gigs (e.g. logo design, writing tasks, programming help, etc...), especially if the freelancer already has an online reputation (e.g. design firm, public profile, work history in other platforms, etc...) For very large tasks that cannot be broken into small milestones, escrow may be a necessary evil. For that we're exploring ways to facilitate a multi-sig escrow transaction with a mutually trusted third-party selected by the client and the freelancer.
Link
Web App: Cgig
Our Motivation: Medium Post
Anything Else
We started development after the last SBC. So Cgig is a completely new project and is built on top of a custom stack. We love building things but we also want to build the right thing. So please if you have any suggestion/feedback they are always appreciated.
