on the crypto
The next generation of the gig economy may look more like decentralized finance (DeFi) than Uber. Braintrust has raised $ 18 million to meet its growth goal, bringing its total funding to date to $ 24 million.
brain trust
San Francisco-based Braintrust is another example of how the fundamentals of DeFi's multi-billion dollar experiment can be applied to real-world use cases. Braintrust focuses on solving the liquidity problem encountered when creating bilateral markets.
Braintrust's solution reflects the shared flexibility and decentralized governance of protocols such as Compound Finance, upon which part of its software is based. Taking a step back, Braintrust CEO Adam Jackson is a veteran of building bilateral markets, including an e-commerce platform acquired by Intuit, an automotive market acquired by Advanced Autoparts, and another called Doctor on Demand. The common denominator is how expensive it can be to create liquidity in these networks to get them off the ground, and the effect this may have later on.
More DeFi, less Uber
Typically, investors, who are the owners of the market, sooner or later start taxing the network, increasing commissions. This then begins to erode the network effects of the business, Jackson said, creating divergent incentives between service operators and the people who make a living there.
The sad image of this dynamic is encapsulated in Uber's iniquities (Uber shares - NYSE: UBER). "While five San Francisco kids have become deca-billionaires, a third of all Uber drivers live below the poverty line, some of them even live in the cars they drive," he said. "So I wanted to figure out how to create a market that is owned and controlled by its users, rather than by investors who just want to tax it."
Non-profit protocol
Jackson describes Braintrust as a "working protocol" in the same way that Ethereum is a smart contract protocol. As such, it's more like a nonprofit organization, a kind of public good, he said, on which other businesses and use cases will thrive, rather than a composable space like DeFi.
Likewise, the project's tokenomics are limited to governance and voting decisions (there will be a free token issuance to Braintrust users in the middle of next year).
The recovery after COVID
After a two-year incubation, Braintrust's private beta was taking off when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. But after "a few terrible months," customers started calling back. In terms of numbers, Jackson said Braintrust currently has several thousand testnet token holders and a 40.000-strong waiting list for when the service goes public next year.
The thing that attracts big companies like Porsche and Nestlé is the low rates, Jackson said, and not some kind of tech magic. “It's not because we're building on a blockchain,” he said. "These guys don't give a damn."
