Talent is a builder network. We rank builders, make their work visible, and help ecosystems support the best ones. Right now, we're focused on making talent.app sticky and turning that engagement into revenue.
If we win, $TALENT holders win with us.
LinkedIn might be the world's largest professional network, but it runs mostly on self-reported credentials. Talent works differently. We curate and index real building activity and turn it into reputation you can't fake.
The builders at the top of our leaderboards aren't there because they posted "What running a marathon taught me about B2B sales." They're there because they shipped.
This post covers three things:
What Talent is today
What's next
How $TALENT holders win if we win
Let's get into it.
Our mission is simple: give builders the recognition they deserve.
Builder recognition is broken. The loudest voices on Twitter aren't always the best builders. The most-followed accounts aren't necessarily shipping the most important work. And when ecosystems want to find and reward their top contributors, they're often flying blind, relying on "InfoFi", or whoever shows up in their Discord.
We fix that. Talent is a builder network that ranks and rewards the best builders. Not based on follower counts or self-promotion, but based on verified activity. What you build, where you contribute, how consistently you ship.
Without a real reputation layer, the merit promise stays hollow. Ecosystems can't find their best builders. Builders can't prove their track record. And liquidity flows to the loudest, not the best.
Talent is a system with two layers.
Talent Protocol is the engine under the hood. It indexes and verifies builder activity across 100+ data points (GitHub commits, onchain deployments, ecosystem rewards) and turns that into programmable reputation: scores, rankings, and credentials. The protocol powers discovery and search, and exposes reputation data via the Talent API to external apps like Basenames or Etherscan.
Talent App is our interface on top of the protocol. Builders showcase verified activity. Ecosystems run growth campaigns to reward their top contributors. Leaderboards surface who's shipping the most. Project pages give context to what builders are working on. And search tools let anyone find proven builders filtered by skills, activity, and reputation.
The path to building a builder network took us through several phases, each with its own hard lessons.
We tried many things: career tokens, betting on goals, Talent Houses. The market wasn't ready. We learned, survived, and became better builders because of it.
Two hard lessons from this phase. First, when the market isn't there, product barely matters. Second, token incentives created an illusion of product-market fit.
We narrowed our focus to one idea: programmable reputation. We built the Builder Score, the Creator Score, the Talent API. Not flashy products, but primitives. The fundamental building blocks for everything that would come later. This phase taught us patience. B2B sales cycles are long, and product-market fit isn't a single moment. We're still learning what resonates most with customers.
Boost your Builder Score by 3 points
Unlock exclusive perks coming soon
Make your reputation verifiable & accessible to everyone
Initial traction arrived. We closed our first B2B deals with Base, Celo, WalletConnect, and Stacks. And we distributed almost 600K USD to builders since Q2 2025.
We’ve also simplified our domain from talentprotocol.com to talent.app. Simpler name, mainstream positioning, same values. We're building for builders anywhere, not just the CT bubble.
We're long-term focused but we don't publish long roadmaps full of features we might never build. We've learned our lesson the hard way. Instead, we're sharing our short-term priorities for the coming months. This is what we're actually working on.
We want builders checking Talent regularly because it's useful, but not just because there's money on the table. That means increasing weekly active users (WAU) and creating habit loops that don't depend solely on external incentives.
How we're doing it: investing in a flawless user experience, building shareable campaigns and leaderboards driven by the builder score, and adding gamification and progression systems that make engagement feel rewarding even without token rewards.
We're also exploring open standards like ERC-8021 and ERC-8092 to make builder reputation interoperable.
Engagement without revenue is a vanity metric.
On the ecosystem side, we're helping teams deliver a clear “why build with us.” to a quality builder audience.
On the builder side, we're growing Talent+ subscriptions by adding real value for subscribers: increased visibility in search results, access to exclusive reward campaigns, and detailed profile analytics.
These are smaller explorations running alongside our main focus.
We're exploring cool new ways for traders to discover and bet on builder tokens directly within talent.app. The revenue potential seems significant, but it only works if we have engaged builders first. You can't build a market around people no one's paying attention to, right? So we're making sure we have a strong builder network under the trading layer.
We have the largest network of verified builders. That's valuable for recruiters and teams trying to hire. We're exploring advanced search tools like AI-powered queries and granular filtering, to let professionals tap into this supply.
In most onchain businesses, token holders are treated as second-class citizens. Tokens exist mostly for liquidity and marketing, but when it comes to actual ownership, equity holders come first.
We made a different choice. Talent is a DAO LLC and has no equity.
$TALENT holders are the real owners of the ecosystem. We made a structural decision on the day we were born: May 1st, 2021.
When Talent wins, $TALENT holders win. There's no one else in line ahead of you.
Holding $TALENT already gets you:
Earning boosts in selected reward campaigns
Heavy discounts on Talent+ subscriptions
Access to Vault V1, with Vault V2 coming soon
No hype or fake promises. We get profitable first.
Then we share value back with long-term holders.
Until then: full focus on building a builder network that makes us net positive.
Four years of building. Countless pivots, hard lessons, and moments where it would have been easier to quit.
But we didn't.
And now, something feels different. The pieces are falling into place. We have a product that builders and ecosystems actually use. We have a token structure that means when we win, our token holders win with us.
The core team is energized, focused, and more confident than we've ever been. Not because we've figured everything out, but because we've survived long enough to know we can handle whatever comes next.
If you believe in us and our mission, here's how you can help:
Tell your builder friends about talent.app
Refer ecosystems that want to grow their builder community
Build with the Talent API to integrate reputation data in your app
Bet on builders.
If we win, you win with us.
Let's do this
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PCBO and Filipe Macedo
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