Proof-of-Talent is a cutting-edge reputation protocol designed to measure talent and showcase personal achievements in an objective, transparent way. It provides a trustless environment for individuals to build their professional reputation based on achievements verified with on-chain and off-chain records.

The Problem with Traditional Talent Evaluation

Today's methods for evaluating talent are inadequate for modern online-based work like freelancing, open source contributions and contributing to DAOs. Unfortunately, people at the beginning of their careers are often measured based on status symbols like education diplomas, job titles, and previous organizations' reputations rather than their actual skills and willingness to learn. This approach leads to exclusive hiring practices, which can prevent talented people from accessing jobs they would otherwise be capable of. 

Organizations often struggle to find and hire talent, resulting in non-optimal recruitment decisions. Increasing recruitment budgets for talent sourcing can lead to more cold contacting, spam in-mails, and paying unnecessarily high premiums for headhunters. These methods rely on legacy talent measurement and signaling methods and can be a huge cost across industries. 

These problems are not limited to traditional organizations but also apply to the web3 community. Even the recent public discussion of decentralized identity and on-chain reputation has largely overlooked talent measurement and signaling. As a result, most web3 companies and DAOs still rely on web2-native talent discovery methods.

The Solution: Proof-of-Talent

To address these issues, Proof-of-Talent introduces a trustless and transparent approach to talent measurement. By aggregating people's contributions and achievements in a blockchain environment, Proof-of-Talent creates on-chain credentials, primarily through Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), that represent a person's achievements and contributions.

The protocol's modular and community-led approach allows for custom solutions to be built on top of it, always ensuring wide acceptance of which credentials best represent one's skills and how much they account for them. The benefits of the Proof-of-Talent protocol are similar to decentralized identity: you own your data, and your reputation is generated automatically based on the credentials in your wallets.

Proof-of-Talent allows individuals to link multiple wallets to their unique identifier and bridge their off-chain achievements to their wallets with custom oracle services. There is no need to verify one's skill set multiple times or manually update their resume once every contribution across their work history is stored on-chain and tied to one identity.

Organizations and recruiters can use the protocol's skill scores to validate candidates anonymously and objectively, resulting in better hiring decisions and more accurate matches between the organization and the candidate. The Proof-of-Talent subgraph and client UIs, like Kleoverse Badge Store, provide up-to-date, verified information.

Architecture

Each person's Proof-of-Talent reputation consists of Skills, which are constructed from various achievements that contribute to a person's skill score. The core of the Proof-of-Talent protocol is the Attestation Registry, based on the modular Attestation Protocol initially developed by Sismo.

To map an individual credential to a Skill, a person requests to have their achievement recorded on the Registry by presenting a claim and proof to the Attester. Attestations support both on-chain and off-chain checks and are available for open contribution and evaluation.

After making a successful attestation, the attestation value is linked to a person's unique identity. Each person has one unique identity in the Attestation Registry, and they can link as many wallets as they want to this identity. Based on stored attestations, people can further mint badges to showcase their skills and achievements across the decentralized web. Badges are minted as Souldbound tokens - SBTs – which are non-tradable, self-revocable NFTs that follow the stateless ERC-1155 standard.

The Proof-of-Talent protocol is currently deployed on Polygon Mainnet.