This is a mission statement, not just a memo.

COVID has been a big game changer in the way the world works. An increased paradigm shift in people having to work from home. Greater coordination with people across the globe. However that paradigm shift has been accompanied by an even larger wave of fragmentation of work that we call the gig economy.

What’s clear is that the work of tomorrow is evolving to more hyper connected and fragmented opportunities against the status quo of long-term, salary-based work.

Those who have the curiosity to explore a hyper connected world, learn skill sets and connect with communities to work towards an ambitious vision.

Those who seek a sense of belonging within a community.

They will be part of a flourishing community, the contributor economy where value addition, fluid inter-community contribution credentialism & promotion of inclusivity within a community will be the new criteria for the success of the work of tomorrow.

From the Gig Economy to the Contributor Economy

Web3 gave rise to an organizational structure that empowers contributors with a stake in the growth of their community irrespective of jurisdiction: DAOs. DAOs are the crown jewels of web3 displaying immense potential through trustless and incentivized coordination of contributors. Revitalising new generations of artists, advanced DeFi infra and fueling solutions for causes like longevity, climate change.

However this wave of DAOs hasn't had it easy. Accused of reinventing the wheel of work, the contributors certainly would have felt so operating everyday. Having to manually add contributors to pay them off, bearing the gas costs that come from threshold consensus of a DAO multi sig transaction. No DAO native tools that could account for & analyze this operational activity to optimize for. Life was tough for them.

Until Parcel..

A look back at 2021: Connecting the Dots

Parcel was conceived as a treasury & payroll management tool to solve these major pain points.

Parcel offered users a sophisticated platform with features such as automated recurring payouts and seamless quick payout transfers, cutting out redundant processes and saving time. Batching up transactions allowed for gas savings that could be redirected by the DAO towards other crucial expenses. Parcel became a major leader in this vertical with over 750 safes created and over $90 mn processed for the DAO economy.

However the more we spoke to our partners, the more we realized a greater opportunity and frontier existed around the niche of contributor reward distribution rather than the broad spectrum of treasury management .

DAOs have a product lifecycle and contributor models to figure out through community consensus. At the same time they have to operate a dynamic payroll to incentivize a contributor class who works across DAOs & demands flexibility, good reward distribution for the fragmented tasks they do. Satisfying those needs with accessible features was the need of the hour.

Considering that, the Parcel team, after months of intense brainstorming with partners & sleepless nights of development, now bring you version two of our platform with a grand vision of being the:

Parcel V2

A typical DAO has multiple internal teams where contributors send payment requests to their heads. It has a high amount of variable and ad hoc payments to execute and lacks a fixed compensation structure especially for irregular contributors.

The Parcel V2 is a friend for such DAOs. It is a highly versatile application that acts as the payment rails for two types of user personas:

DAO core operators with a feature set that adapts to the contributor reward model of any DAO
&DAO contributors by gelling with their dynamic work structure through an all inclusive gateway of work submission and payment features

We’ve simplified the app workflows for our existing feature set within a seamless & user friendly interface ideal for DAO operators & contributors. We’ve also developed new features in line with user feedback, here they are:

CONTRIBUTOR PROFILES

Contributors are the heart of a DAO and consequently the lifeblood of the contributor economy. Parcel now enables them to create contributor profiles within the app. Contributors can now submit their work to leads in the working group seamlessly and make payment requests directly from Parcel.

This eliminates the use of multiple apps to communicate and submit work with the lead, eliminates redundant steps for a contributor to get paid now.

CONTRIBUTOR PAYMENT REQUESTS

A feature that our partners have been waiting for, operators now no longer have to check Discord, e-mail & DAO community forums to verify the work of contributors and approve payment requests.

Aggregate & execute payment requests seamlessly along with the ability to review a contributor’s work portfolio through Parcel.

TAG SYSTEM

We’ve developed a flexible tag system to help you save recipients across roles, departments and teams for future payments & accounting purposes. In v1, the teams and contributors were added to their respective teams. Users could make quick payouts to the contributors and they could be part of multiple teams.

Now in v2, each person can have multiple tags such as Marketing, Developers, Junior devs, senior full stack etc and a particular tag can be selected to pay out all the contributors under it. This feature easily accommodates the fluid nature of contributors working across multiple teams & saves the DAO operator time while making payouts.

PAYROLL WORKFLOWS

Remember all those times where you had to worry and spend time setting up payment processes for fixed recurring payments ! Now with our payroll workflows, you now have the opportunity to automate payouts at recurring intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly).

This makes paying out your fixed expenses and core team member compensation easy. All you now have to do is just set the payouts with a specified start and end time. The workflows also support multi token payout.

MULTI TOKEN PAYOUTS

All our payment features now support Multi Token Payout, now you can pay out contributors in a split of tokens. Multi token payouts have been a highly sought after feature as a consequence of contributor demand , for decreasing payout risk & achieving cost optimization in payroll ops.

The user can now select multiple tags and add multiple people under each tag. There is an option to pay one contributor in multiple tokens. Imagine paying 10 employees in the HR team and each person being paid in a different token, this is now possible with Parcel V2.

Like what you see already? Here’s a sweetener for you DAO operators: Get your multi sig transaction fees sponsored by Parcel through our Parcel Partner Initiative. All you have to do is to fill in this form and our team will reach out to you.

Building the Rails Ahead

Promoting a compelling user experience & seamlessly facilitating reward distributions are core values of Parcel’s efforts to empower the next generation of DAO contributors.

Parcel has been quietly expanding its team with additions from e-commerce giant Amazon & top DAOs like Index Coop & ScribeDAO to achieve its vision.

Creating tools that allow for flexibility and transparency in compensation structures, providing power to contributors to decide compensation in harmony with DAO cost expectations, these are what we plan to build for next, stay tuned for more through our Twitter & Mirror channels!

If you’re not content with being on the sidelines, join our Discord & collaborate with us to build the next generation of financial primitives for the contributor economy