Today I will examine a project that I can see immediate personal benefits from. It is going to be about SpringRole, a protocol for attestation of professional qualifications, skills and work experience.
As an active daily LinkedIn user, I can clearly see that blockchain can bring the benefits in the field, and this is exactly what SpringRole is trying to accomplish.
The Idea
I wouldn't say that the idea is new and unique since there are several other projects that seek to solve the same problem. In essence, SpringRole wants to create a social network that will make the process of seeking potential employees easier than it is now. It will also provide infrastructure for other projects in the job-seeking, freelancing, attestation, etc. sectors. Blockchain technology should solve the problem of authenticity of users’ profiles and credentials, which means that recruiters won't have to spend any time checking if candidates’ qualifications and work experience are genuine.
Here is where the SpringRole's attestation capabilities will come into place. Education can be attested by universities, and previous employments – by respective employers. The blockchain will ensure that the information is genuine and cannot be forged. The weight of every attestation will depend on the attester’s reputation in the system. You might remember that I am a professional linguist/translator. Therefore, if I verify another translator's skills, my attestation will have more weight that the same attestation done by, for example, a software engineer.
Basically, a user will be able to either request verification of his/her skills from other users (colleagues, university coursemates, clients, etc.) and organizations (schools, organizations, employers).
There will be five types of attesters in the network, namely individuals, companies, universities, third-party course providers like Udemy or Coursera and examination providers (the first thing that comes to my mind is the British Council that administrates a bunch of language exam and could attest users' expertise in the English language).
The Technology
From the technological point of view, SpringRole is an attestation protocol powered by the public ledger and reputation scores.
The use of the SPRING token should encourage creation of various dApps on top of the SpringRole's network. This could be a freelancing platform that would use SpringRole's attestation data to match clients with freelancers, or a reference check database.
The Team and Advisors
The team is strong technically, with CEO and Founder Kartik Mandaville having extensive experience with blockchain projects and tech start-ups, including Science Inc., Mammoth Media, Science Blockchain, Lenny Credit and several others. Chief Business Developer and Strategist David Lewis spent many years combined with Union Bank of California, Edmunds.com, Ebates and Shopzilla. Product Manager Shivhari Shankar worked as Software Engineer with Cisco while Software Architect Hank Hwang served as Software Developer at Hulu.
The team of advisors is very impressive and big (11 people), and their knowledge and expertise will certainly benefit the project. Mike Jones managed portfolios of start-ups that would later be acquired by such giants as Google, NY Times and Unilever. Rick Marini represents crypto investment fund Protocol Ventures. Jason Morton worked for Credit Suisse as well as for Harvard and Stanford Universities. The rest of the advisors have considerable background in tech and investment firms.
The Token
The total token supply is 10bn, with 2,550,000,000 tokens available for sale. According to SpringRole's official Telegram channel, the total hard cap is $12m. The rest of the tokens will be distributed as follows:
The Product
The product is currently in its beta stage and it is available here: https://beta.springrole.com/. Anyone can already register a profile there and get 100 free SPRING tokens. The project's current roadmap should be completed by the end of 2018, with all components up and running by that time.
Conclusion
To sum up, I would like to quote one of my university professors who said that when writing a thesis "you don't have to invent anything radically new, you just have to pick an existing idea and try to improve it". I think this is what SpringRole is about. The project is not trying to re-invent a wheel (no 4.0 blockchains, billions of TPS or other shiny things). It tries to take the best from the existing professional platforms and use blockchain to leverage the benefits both for users and employers. This, in turn, will create room for the network effect and provide other bright minds with an opportunity to build upon SpringRole's platform and improve it. The project has a very strong technical team and equally strong support from their advisers. The hard cap is low, and the token has a good utility within the platform. I can clearly see some hype going on among investors about SpringRole right now but ultimately the success of the project will depend on the team's ability to secure some solid partnerships.
More info about SpringRole:
SpringRole website: https://springrole.com
SpringRole Bitcointalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3556999
SpringRole Bitcointalk Bounty: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3602729
SpringRole Telegram: https://t.me/springrole
SpringRole Whitepaper: https://docsend.com/view/k5nghff
This article is not a buy/sell recommendation. I am not a financial adviser and you should do your own research before investing in any project.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for other reviews and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!
My Bitcointalk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1348652
My ETH address: 0x2bFbEa421018A8b0174D843503F67b28A8599d43