Request for Startups 2021 - Services for crypto-native Organizations | Protocol Labs

Request for Startups 2021 - Services for Crypto-Native Organizations

Protocol Labs is an open-source R&D lab that aims to radically improve the internet through building protocols, tools, and services. We’ve already launched many successful projects: Filecoin, IPFS, Drand, libp2p, Coinlist, and more.

Along the way, we have realized that some of the hardest challenges that companies face are of a non-technical nature. For many companies, creating the infrastructure that can support a world-class, fully distributed team is the biggest challenge. This includes global employment, decentralized work coordination, and identity management.

We’re excited to see a wave of new teams that are creating new coordination mechanisms, leveraging cryptography, smart contracts, and novel incentive structures for decentralized, autonomous team collaboration. We envision a world in which “crypto-native” teams can lean on these services, leaving them free to focus on the core technical issues they set out to solve.

That’s why we are putting out a Request for Startups, inviting new and current companies to seek support from the Protocol Labs Network and join the crypto-native revolution.

This is the first of a series of Requests for Startups from Protocol Labs.

Services for Crypto-Native Organizations

RFS list

Global Employment Platform for Crypto-Native Organizations

By definition, global workforces are global. Maintaining compliance becomes more complex as your team expands to new countries. At the same time, crypto is rapidly changing how teams work. Moving from a centralized to a decentralized model, groups can organize in new ways and more quickly than ever before.

We want to see the creation of a platform and/or service that can manage employment for individuals so they can focus on contributing to one or many teams within a network. This platform should enable crypto-native organizations to compensate employees with a mix of fiat and crypto currencies.

Additionally, in this new paradigm, individuals may no longer expect to work for a single organization over a long period of time. Instead, they may contribute to multiple projects at once. That means it no longer makes sense for individuals to have long standing agreements with a single entity, which would limit their ability to contribute to multiple projects.

Requirements/wishes:

We seek companies that aim to support the evolution of a global workforce, by creating a platform with the elasticity to meet the needs of the geo-diverse teams that are most common in Crypto-Native (Web3/Blockchain) organizations.

In short, we seek to:

• Make employment easy for the new teams and startups in our network
• Enable contributors to deliver value to a multitude of projects and teams over time, without being trapped in a single team/project and then having to offboard/onboard to a new company
• Ensure that everyone can be employed in a legally-compliant way (taxes, contributions, benefits)

This platform should be:

• Capable of supporting thousands of different projects and separate teams
• Capable of supporting tens of thousands of employees
• Geographically diverse (worldwide)

Decentralized Work Coordination Tooling: Milestone and Bounty Platform

Within most organizations there are mechanisms to enable top-down control over the problem-solving process, enabling a self-consistent and well-planned path to a solution. We believe that communities or networks of organizations can progress at the same scale as large organizations, but with lower overheads. However, decentralized coordination requires permissionless and decentralized tools for setting, aligning against, and tracking goals.

Requirements/wishes:

• A platform in which any participant in an ecosystem can:
  • Propose goals that would advance the community
  • Comment on proposed goals
  • View current goals (including causal dependencies and sorting by metrics)
  • Demonstrate (or link to) progress against goals
  • Pledge payment to teams completing one of the current goals
• A platform might also:
  • Feature a reputation system that scores contributors and bounty payers, tracking their follow-through rates
  • Facilitate direct payment to teams that complete key goals
  • Leverage cryptocurrencies for payments
  • Leverage Escrow payments to guarantee bounty funds

Tools for Governance

Decentralized organizations need to make decisions just like any organization does. But in making decisions, how can they remain inclusive of all stakeholders? Many decentralized projects use token voting (similar to shareholder voting in a corporation) but we need other mechanisms as well.

Requirements/wishes:

• Multiple Governance structures (democracy, elected democracy, token voting, delegated voting, and new forms of decision making)
• Great tooling and UX, enabling everyone to contribute
• Bookkeeping software that documents the background behind each decision, enabling its validity to be evaluated if the context changes in future.

Identity and Permission Management for Crypto-Native Orgs

Crypto-native orgs need a decentralized way to define and relate individuals, teams, roles, policies, resources, and permissions.

Requirements/wishes:

• The cornerstone of the system is the ability to create a portable DID based entity
• The ability of an entity to act as the custodian of a crypto wallet
• Ability to associate an entity with external identities
• Ability to define permissions for an entity
• Ability to define security contexts, and security context oracles
• Ability to define a services interface for vendor entities

Corporate Services for Decentralized Organizations (and DAOs)

We seek new services to bridge the gap between crypto-native and traditional infrastructure, enabling fully compliant orgs to be set up conveniently and easily.

Requirements/wishes:

• All the technical tools and advice to spin up a DAO
• Entity formation, tax/business filings, finance solutions

Web3 Training Programs

We seek innovative Web3 Training Programs that can accelerate the onboarding process.

Requirements/wishes:

• Intensive training programs to accelerate the adoption of Web3 and increase the talent pool
• Organizations delivering training need to be able to adapt quickly
• A focus on specific areas of expertise, technologies, or target audiences

Credentialing and Level Assessment for Decentralized Organizations

We seek a platform that develops and maintains level standards, enabling people to communicate their skills to crypto-native orgs.

Requirements/wishes:

• A platform that captures the nuance of specialization areas and different levels
• Decentralized level assessment to help people communicate their skills

Workspaces Designed for Teams Without a Main HQ

With the rise of decentralized teams, there’s a need for the creation of hubs for those teams to meet in.

Requirements/wishes:

• Accept payments and booking through crypto
• Fully serviced options (food, office equipment)
• Video teams ready to record, edit and publish results
• Accommodation for teams that need to travel

Blockchain NetOps as a Service

We seek companies that:

• Provide “Blockchain project node running” as a service on-prem and in cloud
• Offer infrastructure deployment/setting up of operations
• Provide continuous support and maintenance of said infrastructure

Have a great idea that’s not on this list?

Got a great idea or a business that supports crypto-native organizations but don’t see it listed here? Please apply to one of our many funding opportunities, we would love to hear from you.