Build a Better Commitment between Client and Worker in Freelance Market with Blockchain Technology

Have you ever experienced payment problems in your freelance jobs?. Maybe your client doesn’t want to pay you after the work you’ve done or maybe they don’t want to pay you in the first place. It must be a bad experience in your career as a freelancer 😢.

When this problem occurs, you must do something to make you get paid. From frequently contacting your client, send them the invoices to remind them of their responsibility and the bad one is preparing yourself for suing them in court 🙀 .

The preventive action regarding this problem to occur is to make a legal agreement, but still, when a bad thing happens, you need to go to court, pay for a lawyer, and go through a long path of court. However it cannot guarantee you to get your payment 😱 .

Another preventive action is to ask the client to put some deposit before starting any work. While it shows the client's good faith, it still has some problems. The worker can run away without needing to work on the projects or tasks.

So, how to ensure the client has the money to pay the workers  or guarantee the workers not run away with the deposits? 🤔

We can utilize Smart Contracts that are written on top of blockchain technology to make it possible. Since smart contracts is a n immutable set of rules that are written on top of blockchain technology, it can be used to write a kind of contract that makes the client deposit their money in the contract and guarantee the workers not run away with their money.  On the other side, the workers are able to see the client’s good faith (ensure the client has the money).

Here the scenario:

1. The client locks their money in a smart contract. Since smart contracts live in blockchain, the money must be in the form of coins/tokens.
2. After the client locks their money in a smart contract, the worker will be able to see it and have confidence that the client has the money.
3. While projects usually have milestones, we can use it on smart contracts as a mark of partial payment of the projects. Let say the cost of project is 10K USDT and have 10 milestones, after the workers achieve their first milestones, they will be able to withdraw 1K USDT as the payment (it will be good if it require both signatures for the withdrawal process)

It’s not always sunshine and rainbows, sometimes both parties cannot come to an agreement on the withdrawal process, it will make the workers unable to get their payment and the client’s money stuck on smart contracts. In this scenario, we will need someone to judge the case. This is not really “someone” (one person), we can utilize DAO to judge the case in a fair manner.

I will elaborate on the DAO mechanism and reward for the voters in the other part.

Enjoy the weekend 🏖