Today, we at Kleoverse are launching Proof-of-Talent to the Polygon mainnet. Proof-of-Talent is a modular protocol for measuring talent and showcasing personal achievements with on and off-chain records. Builders can mint non-transferrable badges (Soulbound Tokens, SBTs) for their skills, previous projects, and open-source contributions; with these on-chain credentials, Kleoverse helps them build web3 portfolios and find their next opportunities.

This launch is a major step in the journey of building web3-native professional identities. We envision a world where all builders can verify their skills with previous work and its results, enabling equal access to working opportunities across the decentralized web. We’re building Proof-of-Talent to be a core component of this future.

Talent signaling with traditional status symbols is broken

We believe existing methods for talent evaluation are insufficient for modern online-based work. People are typically measured based on status symbols like education diplomas, job titles, and previous employers’ reputations instead of their actual skills and willingness to learn. As a result, hiring happens within exclusive inner circles, omitting people outside of them regardless of their capabilities.

Organizations across fields repeatedly mention access to talent as one of their fundamental challenges. Common solutions include even more intensive reliance on personal networks as well as recruitment budget increases, leading to a rising amount of cold contacting, spammy in-mails, and paying unnecessarily high premiums for headhunters.

These problems are common across industries, and also apply to the web3 community. Professional identity and reputation haven’t sparked general interest – even the recent discussion about decentralized identity and on-chain reputation has lacked talent measurement and signaling considerations. There haven’t been reliable ways of verifying skills with on-chain data, let alone leveraging this data in hiring. As a result, most web3 companies and DAOs still rely mainly on web2-native talent discovery methods. Costs are huge – not only in terms of wasted time and money but also in non-optimal recruitment decisions.

Professional identity but designed for the web

We believe professional identity is built on a person’s achievements and referrals. They represent different sides of oneself, being specific to varying contexts and people involved. Achievements, referrals, and other credentials are attached to identity – a person’s reputation is formed as a subjective evaluation of them.

While focusing solely on the professional context, we believe that identity has multiple characteristics. Fundamentally, achievements should not represent only one side of a person but a multitude of them, ranging from passions and hobbies via education and tutorials completed to open-source contributions and full-time employment. Neither your identity should be tied to a single source – like an individual wallet, let alone a traditional, linear CV.

With the Proof-of-Talent protocol, we are presenting a new primitive for professional identity based on blockchain-verified skills and recorded achievements. We display the diversity of internet-age careers by capturing signals from a multitude of sources and encouraging developers to build new attesters to diversify the solution further. Relying on SBTs, we enforce trust by verifying data on-chain and making it inherently public. In addition, we allow users to map multiple wallet addresses to their identity and comprehensively represent their contributions and achievements throughout the decentralized web.

Proof-of-Talent protocol: Verify Skills and record Achievements on-chain

To make talent measurement more objective and transparent, as well as to build a new primitive for professional identity, we present the Proof-of-Talent protocol. It records contributions and achievements to a trustless environment, blockchain, in a form of on-chain Badges, mainly SBTs.

The Proof-of-Talent protocol is deployed on Polygon. One of its core smart contracts, the modular Attestation Protocol, was initially developed by Sismo.io.

Skills

The main component of each person’s Proof-of-Talent is Skills. Each Skill is constructed from various Achievements and represented as a single score to display the level of talent.

Achievements contribute to the user’s Skill Score with varying weights, depending on the Skill and the type of Achievement. Each Skill is calculated with a specific formula, unique for each skill.

Essentially, Skill Scores measure the person’s Achievements in certain areas of expertise, giving a brief and actionable overview of one’s verified experience. They can be used for building portfolios, filtering based on skill levels, gating access to services and working opportunities, and many other applications. They are also the core part of Kleoverse Portfolios to enable more accurate and efficient hiring decisions.

Achievements

Proof-of-Talent protocol lets anyone record on-chain proofs for their valuable Achievements with custom-made smart contracts. Multiple different Achievements can be recorded:

• Previous projects

• Open-source contributions (bridged on-chain with custom-made attestations)

• Educational courses

• Attendance at reputable events and organizations (like hackathons or DAOs)

• Referrals

• Other verifiable signals of valuable work

Achievements create a verified record of one’s working history, stored in the person’s wallet. Furthermore, they are mapped to Skill Scores for actionability and hierarchy, as well as for measuring the level of talent they represent.

We prioritize on-chain Achievements, and they have a primary weight on Skill Scores. However, to bootstrap the Skill Scores and create a comprehensive picture of one’s expertise, we have built custom-made smart contracts for bridging off-chain achievements to the blockchain. This enables builders to record e.g. their GitHub-based open-source contributions as on-chain Achievements, contributing to their Skill Scores.

Badges

Each Achievement and Skill is showcased with SBT-based Badges. They can be minted and stored in the user’s wallet, letting people fully own their reputation. Badges are non-transferable, enforcing trust in the identities they are representing.

Badges can be used for building portfolios, achievement-gating access in organizations and services, dividing work for people with certain skill levels, and for multiple other applications.

Hire builders with Proof-of-Talent

Kleoverse is the first product built on top of the Proof-of-Talent protocol. We are developing the platform of work in web3 to enable leading companies, DAOs, and other organizations to find high-quality builders for their projects.

Organizations and recruiters can use the protocol’s Skill Scores to validate candidates anonymously in an objective and transparent way. Leveraging on-chain recorded Achievements, we have designed a portfolio specifically for developers and other web3 builders. It represents their relevant working history actionably, based on blockchain-verified Badges.

By relying on blockchain-verified data, our goal is to solve the main problem of talent signaling today: inaccurate talent measurement that overlooks skilled builders across the globe. Regardless of how talented they are within their area of expertise, if builders lack networks or traditional status signals, they face difficulties in finding suitable opportunities. We help them prove their talent with an internet-native professional identity, and enable organizations to tap into this talent pool.

Ultimately, we believe this results in better hiring decisions and more accurate matches between organizations and candidates.

Going forward

We are building Kleoverse and Proof-of-Talent for revolutionizing talent measurement, signaling, and discovery on the web. We want to see a world in which working opportunities are divided purely based on verified skills, not networks or status signals – Proof-of-Talent is designed to become a core component of decentralized professional identities enabling this future.

While we want to develop Kleoverse to become the leading platform for web3 work, the core principle of the Proof-of-Talent protocol is to be modular and community-led. We want to encourage custom solutions to be built on top of it by providing a convenient API, SDK, and a subgraph. We would love to see Skills and Achievements used broadly across the decentralized web in various applications for talent measurement, skill-gating access, or for many other use cases. If you want to use Proof-of-Talent in your project, reach out to us at Discord!

Also, our aim is to ensure Proof-of-Talent always represents Skills in a widely accepted way. In particular, we want to ensure mapped Achievements display one’s Skills accurately, with carefully defined and community-approved weights. Kleoverse Core Team remains in charge of the protocol governance for the time being, but our goal is to start progressive decentralization of the protocol from Skill mapping.

We encourage everyone to start recording their Skills and Achievements on-chain to build their Web3 Portfolio – all feedback is highly appreciated via Discord! Learn more about Proof-of-Talent here, and start hiring web3 builders with Proof-of-Talent here.