dApp Review: CanWork

As the digital economy begins to grow as well as the gig economy freelancing has become a popular medium of earning a side income or even making it your primary way of receiving your wages. The rise in freelancing has been centralised work distribution platforms become widely successful. Sites like Upwork, Freelancer, 5iver and PeoplePerHour have dominated this space of connecting clients to freelancers.

These sites act as middlemen and take a fee on all payments done via the platform. The competitive nature of these platforms has seen freelancers working for well below the industry average to try and get work and clients have been taking advantage of this race to the bottom. These platforms care very little for their vendors and are only interested in the volume of transactions rather than helping deliver quality work and promoting freelancers.

Freelancing on the blockchain

Blockchain apps are starting to build cheaper alternatives to centralised platforms, and CanWork is no exception. They aim to disrupt the centralised model and remove the middleman fee taking by connecting freelancers with clients and providing payment via cryptocurrency.

Giving CanWork a try

CanWork offers easy to sign up for members by offering social logins via Gmail, Facebook and Dock.io. Once logged in you need to fill out your profile. The logins where you add a bio, your skills and promote yourself to your potential clients as well as your rates.

Freelancer profile

Freelancer profiles are rather limited with no way to show your portfolio and providing ways to link to sites or an API that could pull in feeds of work you have done or hosted on other sites.

They also don't allow you to add your contact details to be visible as they want to keep contact on their platform.

There is a spot for reviews from happy clients but overall the profiles are rather limiting.

It would also be nice if they could mention which tokens you would accept as payment instead of ETH only since metamask should allow you to send any ER-C token as payment.

Freelancer search

Once your profile is live it will be listed in the freelancer search so clients can find freelancers that have skills they are looking for and want to work with freelancers form a specific region.

Job hunting

There are currently no public jobs available so I could not see what a job card would look like and how to apply for one.

CanWork

The project seems promising and its selling point of low fees and paying with ETH is admirable but they will really need to work on inventory.

I would think they would need to do more marketing to recruit freelancers and even partner with job sites, recruitment companies and the like to start adding inventory for freelancers to bid for as well as getting more skilled workers.

It will be tough since they are not the only blockchain-based freelancing platform but the more options we have the better for the market.

More on CanWork

If you're keen on learning more about CanWork, feel free to check out the following resources to get better acquainted with the project.

• Website
• Medium
• Telegram

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Disclaimer

This was my submission for the @dapplovers writing contest found here

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