Although the company’s co-founders had a previous NFT investing platform, which shut down a day into its beta launch, today the two are back and hopeful with a new Web3 venture called Meritverse

Meritverse, advertised as the “professional network of the metaverse,” launched on Thursday, aiming to become a more crypto-friendly LinkedIn, co-founders Jacob Claerhout and Boris Gordts told Blockworks. 

“Basically, the product we’re trying to build is sort of a Google Maps for Web3 that makes it easy to navigate this new era [of the internet],” Gordts said.

To make a profile on Meritverse, users must put in their wallet address or Ethereum name service (ENS) to ensure authenticity and proof that they’ve worked on certain projects. Profiles display a users’ connections, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) they’ve contributed to and their participation in various crypto communities. 

“[Similar to] LinkedIn, you are able to see where someone has worked before or who they know. People should be able to map out those relationships in order for collaboration [and] hiring to go a lot easier,” Claerhout said. 

However, Meritverse has an edge over LinkedIn because users can ensure their work experience on-chain while centralized networks do not have this capability yet, according to Claerhout. 

“We allow people, in a verifiable way, to showcase who they are as a professional, their talents and their skills,” Claerhout said.  

The platform, which just launched on Product Hunt, comes with rising interest and engagement with DAOs. There are over 180 DAOs with $10.3 billion in assets under management (AUM) and nearly 2 million contributors, according to data from DeepDAO.

DAOs are a new governance structure made possible through the internet and cryptocurrencies. Think of a DAO as an online community with a shared bank account, a group chat and often a mission statement. 

ConstitutionDAO raised $48.9 million from over 17,000 investors, in an effort to buy a copy of the US Constitution from Sotheby’s Auction House in November. Members of the DAO were given governance tokens for contributing to its fund, giving each person a vote on what would happen with the historic document. 

Although the group ultimately lost the bid to hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, the ConstitutionDAO put the concept of decentralized governance structures briefly in the limelight. 

“Our thesis is basically that these DAO workers or people contributing to DAOs are living the future of work. We believe that if we build a product for them the rest of the world will get in, and will catch up in the next 15 years,” Gordts said. 

‘The highs and lows’

Meritverse’s co-founders previously made headlines after their first startup together shut down less than 24 hours into its beta launch last year. 

Visionrare, self-branded as a “fantasy startup investing game,” allowed users to buy synthetic shares— in NFT form — of startups players believed would be fiscally successful. The project received criticism over whether their core product offering was legal, many questioning if its shares were considered securities. 

Visionrare later said they “underestimated the legal complexities” of the project once they launched, according to a statement by the company. Claerhout said the decision to close Visionrare “wasn’t an easy decision, [but] it was also not a major decision.” 

“We did get it more press attention than maybe we should in the sense that we were a two-month-old project,” he said. “It’s obviously a huge privilege to build in public and to become part of the global discussion.”

“The main thing we learned [from Visionrare] was that we’re a great team. We can build and ship things fast. We move fast and sometimes break things. But we learned that we love working together through the highs and the lows,” Claerhout said.

The way we're working is changing. While our grandparents spent their whole lives working for the same company, we’ve since seen a fast decline in the time employees stay with their employers. Today, a lof of people are giving up on traditional 'jobs' altogether to become part of the freelance and creator economy.

In this era of Unbundling Work from Employment, signalling your skills has become more important than ever. That's why people value building an online professional identity, today often in the form of a LinkedIn profile. However, there is a growing community of gig and creator economy workers who’s professional profiles are spread over multiple platforms: designers on Dribble, freelancers on Toptal, developers on Github, drivers on Uber, hosts on AirBnB etc...

In this article, we want to talk about a few of the problems we see with current professional identities:

• Walled gardens around professional profiles lead to an inefficient job market.

• Credentials are a superficial proxy for skills, leading to inefficient and discriminatory recruiting processes.

• Current platforms lack the features to express our multifaceted professional identity.

Walled gardens

One fundamental problem with our current professional identities is that they are owned by tech giants who forcibly keeps them behind walled gardens. They aggressively monetise their natural data monopoly. This is why LinkedIn can ask recruiters 800$ a month for manual access to its library of resumes. This Web2 business model is not aligned with your professional interests: you want your professional information to be accessible to anyone who has relevant opportunities for you, while not getting spammed. The lack of data access prevents innovation to better match work and workers using advanced AI / ML algorithms, better search technology and specialised recruiting services.

Because of the lack of ownership of your professional identity there is no interoperability. Can you estimate the amount of times you've filled in forms sharing your professional information: to apply for jobs, to join a specific community, to create a profile for a conference etc...? You should not have to keep filling out this data and keep it up-to-date when you own your professional profile.

At Meritverse, we believe that professional profiles that are not user-owned and that are forcibly kept behind walled gardens leads to a very inefficient job market, preventing talent from finding more fulfilling and higher paying work.

Credentials are a poor proxy for skills

As the world is moving to remote work, another problem surfaces: today's over-indexing of credentials. When recruiting locally, you can easily rely on your personal network and use the signalling value of the local universities, employers and communities you know well. This mechanism breaks down when you can hire form anywhere. Furthermore, using credentials as proxies for skills is prone to discrimination. And to what degree can you trust self-reported credentials anyway?

We believe social proof and reputation are a key element to the solution here. With this in mind LinkedIn created 'Skill Endorsements and References'. Every LinedIn user knows how ineffective this is. The fact that you can freely endorse anyone without risking your reputation renders this mechanism hollow.

The lack of objective, trustworthy and socially validated professional data makes it hard to trust people, making hiring processes long and expensive.

At Meritverse, we believe that recruiting should be based on skills and reputation. Today's platforms rely on credentialism and have not figured out how to create an incentivised system to signal quality.

Professional identities in the Metaverse

As we're spending an increasing amount of time online in both a personal and professional context, your online identity is gaining importance. This identity is an opportunity to boundlessly express yourself. We see this happening in the crypto scene and in DAOs: people know you by your self-selected nickname and profile picture, not by your real name and your suit-and-tie profile picture. Your credentials no longer speak for you, but your portfolio of work and the reputation you've established in different online communities does. Today's platforms were build for the corporate era, and have no means to capture this new identity or the value you created in different communities.

At Meritverse, we believe that we need web3-native platforms that allow us to showcase our multifaceted professional identity.

Up next

At Meritverse, we're building an open, user-owned and decentralised professional network that allows people to showcase their multifaceted professional identity and that uses crypto incentives to create more value for its members.

Join our waiting list and Discord group to be among the first to become part of the Meritverse.

We are at the dawn of a new era for the internet. Blockchain technology unlocks new possibilities for a user-owned, collaborative and token incentivised internet that is built for value creation for users instead of value extraction by tech giants. We're already starting to see the impact of blockchain technology on finance, entertainment and culture. However, we believe that the impact will be even larger when it comes to the future of work.

The unbundling of work from employment - the trend towards freelance work and the recent rise of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) - have created an environment where operationally it is becoming normal and easy to collaborate with people across the internet. However, finding and attracting talent and collaborating with strangers is still far from self-evident. For resource allocation purposes companies, DAOs and people need to be able to reference someone's professional identity. Today, people's professional identities are locked behind the walled gardens of products like LinkedIn. They lack self-sovereignty, trust, privacy and interoperability. They are scattered across different platforms. They do not reflect the new way of working across the web and they are centred around credentials instead of skills.

Collaboration is inherently social. Your reputation is the accumulation of the perceived value of past contributions. Having a good reputation becomes even more important as people no longer work long-term for the same companies but are increasingly providing their skills for hire in the gig / creator economy. People want to aggregate their contributions across the web into one comprehensive profile and have their past work be valued and validated by peers.

With the shortcomings of current professional identities and networks in mind, we're building the professional network of the future. An open, user-owned and decentralised platform where people showcase their professional identity and build their career. A platform that incentivises people to create valuable professional networks to help each other succeed.

If you want to learn more about our plans, you should continue reading our next couple of posts. We'll zoom in on the problems we identified with today's professional identities and networks. We'll give a first impression of the product we're building to solve these issues and we'll discuss how we plan to build momentum.

If you want to be part of a more valuable and meritocratic professional network, join our waiting list and Discord group to stay updated.