TL;DR

• Spring is here and brings with it a new type of resume, for the onchain era of the internet. 🌱

• We’re calling all builders to help us battle-test Talent Protocol V2 and get ready for the much anticipated $TAL Summer. 🔥

• Surviving the Winter was only possible thanks to the support of partners like Base, Celo, Protocol Labs, ETHGlobal, Worldcoin, CoinList, Alliance DAO, Airstack, and Privy. 🐻

Calling All Web3 Builders to Test Talent Protocol V2

Help us battle-test Talent Protocol V2 and get $TAL airdrops for being an early adopter.

We’re running a 5-week quests campaign in partnership with CoinList, which aims to fine-tune both the protocol design and the Passport App’s UX.

Be the one of the first builders to create a Talent Passport. Start here.

All users that complete quests before April 22nd will earn a share of the 5,000,000 $TAL rewards pool, representing 0.5% of the total token supply.

Making Talent Visible and Blockchain Invisible

Millions of dollars are wasted every year betting on the wrong talent.

We believe this inefficiency is a result of poor reputation data. There are plenty of job boards, CVs, recruiters and countless other tools out there. What is missing is not yet another search engine for talent, what’s missing is better reputation data that can help separate average talent from great talent.

Let’s consider LinkedIn as an example. We see LinkedIn as an old-school phone book: everyone is there, but most just use it to find/contact people. LinkedIn’s self-reported profiles alone cannot reveal real reputation. Real reputation is how others perceive you, not what you say about yourself.

This is the core of Talent Protocol: unlocking rich and verifiable reputation data that can make true talent visible.

Talent Protocol adds an open reputation layer on top of fragmented professional data, revealing new types of reputation data that don't exist today. From self-reported resumes to verifiable, portable reputation.

Read more about our vision here.

Passport App

On the surface, Talent Passports look and feel like a traditional app, but in fact they’re a smart wallet with hidden superpowers:

• It’s portable, which means you access your credentials and connections instantly in multiple different apps.

• It’s verifiable, which means data comes from trusted third-party sources (Web3 and Web2), instead of relying on self-reported data.

Your Talent Passport encapsulates your credentials, connections and credibility:

• Credentials are any type of individual achievements or attestations that come from verifiable sources. Connect your wallets and accounts to automatically import reputation data from approved sources like Github, Coinbase, ETHGlobal, or Worldcoin.

• Connections are the aggregation of your different social graphs from LinkedIn and X, to Farcaster and Lens. We count only mutual follows as connections (i.e., people who follow you and whom you follow back in any given social network) and calculate a strength score for each connection.

• Credibility represents how trustworthy your account is, based on existing identity data points like Proof of Personhood.

Talent Passports have a unique ID number, assigned sequentially. All Talent Passports are treated equally, but low ID numbers always look cool.

Go to airdrop.talentprotocol.com and get your Talent Passport.

Builder Score

Talent Protocol calculates a Builder Score (a number between 0 and 100) for every Talent Passport holder, making it easier for builders to find each other.

By leveraging both offchain and onchain data, we can start scoring Talent Passport holders on the likelihood that they are real builders.

This is just the first iteration of the Builder Score, to show what’s possible to build when you have access to reliable reputation data. We don’t intend for this score to become the protocol’s universal definition of a reputation score. Reputation is often subjective and highly contextual.

In the future, ecosystem apps will be able to define their own scoring systems with the underlying reputation data from Talent Protocol. This means a Talent Passport can have multiple scores, depending on the context in which it’s being displayed.

See more information about how Builder Score is calculated here.

A New Paradigm for Talent Markets Based on Decentralized Reputation

If you’re curious about the technological architecture that feeds the Talent Passport with unique reputation data, you can read our whitepaper.

The paper explains how the protocol brings together curated offchain and onchain data about an individual, and uses both humans and AI to review it.

$TAL Economy

In Web2, resumes and professional profiles are chronically outdated. But, with the right incentives in place, a decentralized protocol could assure the quality of the reputation data stored.

The $TAL token will be an essential part of how Talent Protocol aligns ecosystem stakeholders (i.e. users, app developers, reviewers and token holders) to work towards the shared goals of aggregation, curation and generation of rich professional reputation data.

For example, $TAL will be:

• Staked by ecosystem apps to receive write access to the protocol.

• Staked by reviewers to evaluate Talent Passports.

• Paid by ecosystem apps for easy access detailed reputation data via API.

• Redistributed to ecosystem apps that onboard quality users to the ecosystem.

• Redistributed to reviewers.

$TAL is also a governance token for the future Talent Protocol DAO. The DAO will have the authority to curate which data sources and app developers can write to the protocol, as well as distributing ecosystem grants that foster continuous innovation of the protocol.

In the early stages, the core team will lead the development of the protocol in order to move fast, and to curate a community with strong shared values. As the protocol matures, more rights will be passed to token holders.

The $TAL token is not launched yet. Details about $TAL’s TGE (Token Generation Event) will be shared soon. In the meantime, you can check the tokenomics in the whitepaper and participate in the CoinList Rewards Campaign to be eligible for an airdrop.

Talent Playground

To succeed, most protocols need to first build the flagship app that can earn the attention of enough qDAUs (quality Daily Active Users), and make the ecosystem interesting for third-party developers to build on top. This is what Farcaster’s Dan Romero called product-led protocol development, and why we have the Talent Playground app.

Talent Playground is a consumer facing app, aimed at early adopters and angel users, where we run product experiments to grow the protocol and test innovative use cases for $TAL. Currently, users can bet on other people’s goals and predict who will win a scholarship.

We plan to continue exploring entertaining social games and networking apps that embrace the two sides of crypto: social impact and talent speculation. Because the next big thing usually starts by looking like a toy.

Speaking of play, we also took advantage of this moment to update our logo. The main idea behind it is the composability of our protocol. The symbol consists of two identical shapes, stacked on top of each other to form a modular and dynamic brand system.

Ecosystem Partners

We wouldn’t be where we are today without our super supportive partners. It’s impossible to name everyone who inspired or contributed to Talent Protocol, but some deserve public recognition for their role in shaping Talent Protocol V2.

In no particular order, we want to thank:

• Base and Celo, two blockchains on a mission to onboard a billion users to crypto. Both are pushing to make Web3 more accessible and useful for everyday people.

• Lens, ENS and Farcaster for providing us with composable social primitives that help make the Passport app feel like a magical experience.

• Our infrastructure partners Coinbase, Worldcoin, Privy and Airstack.

• CoinList and Alliance DAO for spotting us very early, and for their continued support during the bear market.

• Protocol Labs, Celo EU and ETHGlobal for supporting the Take Off scholarship program and helping change the lives of hundreds of Web3 builders.

• Founderheads, Flori Ventures, GCR, GNV, GSR, Panony, StatesDAO and many others for their continuous support.

• Last but not least, Eden, Polkamarkets, TAIKAI, Impact Market and Ward Analytics for believing in our vision and committing to integrate with Talent Protocol, to access rich reputation data from hundreds of thousands of Talent Passports.

But this is just the start. We’re doubling down on all these partnerships to make our protocol safer, simpler and stronger.

Last Chance to be a Talent Protocol OG

Winter is ending, and a new season will start. Spring brings renewed energy and the clarity needed to make Talent Protocol V2 a success. In the coming weeks we will start rolling out the core features of the protocol, and testing them with our community.

By Summer time we hope to have a battle-tested our protocol and onboarded more exciting ecosystem partners. But to get there we need your help. Join our incentivized testing campaign, in partnerships with CoinList, and help us get ready for this year’s hot $TAL Summer.