The HUMAN Protocol Foundation and the Elrond Network blockchain platform have teamed up to reinvent how humans and machines interact. 

They are creating a blockchain-based marketplace that connects the world’s freelance workforce with limitless demand for human annotation of raw data from companies building AI systems. 

This new collaboration aims to contribute to the progress of machine learning and to create more job opportunities globally.

A New Generation of the Gig Economy

The HUMAN Protocol is a decentralized platform on which requesters can crowdsource people to perform tasks that bolster machine-learning networks. Artificial intelligence is not so good at identifying specific content, so that’s where humans come in: by assisting in the process of machine learning and in doing so, earning the Human native token (HMT). 

Over the past decade, the gig economy has grown exponentially, especially exploding during the pandemic, during which freelancing has generated $1.2 trillion in the U.S economy alone. 

By providing new opportunities, the gig market has its obvious downsides. Most workers do not receive the same benefits as employees; the fly-by nature of work provides less financial security, not to mention the risk of not getting paid.

The HUMAN Protocol addresses this by creating a blockchain-based infrastructure for distributed labor markets, which is decentralized, accessible, and entirely safe. All transactions are secured in smart contracts, and worker qualifications are verified.

The Decentralization of Labor

By supporting the creation of these marketplaces, the HUMAN Protocol is working to democratize access to labor and to ensure better distribution of value for tasks performed, including, but in no way limited to, data labeling and data feedback.

Data labeling tasks can require visual inference, detailed observation and feedback, such as the identification of a malignant tumor, a car part, a line of code, or cultural-specific interpretation of a piece of clothing, all of which are difficult to quantify traditionally. 

The variety of tasks dramatically expands the gig economy to accommodate a greater variety of backgrounds, as previously the gig economy was largely composed of blue-collar jobs, such as driving cars and delivering packages.

The HUMAN Protocol is striving to create a workforce that is liberated from centralized control, untethered to any single company or market, in which workers of any background, from anywhere on the globe, can access a global marketplace of opportunities.

A Scalable Blockchain Platform

Initially launched on the Ethereum blockchain platform, the HUMAN Protocol faced challenges in operating at a large scale. To ensure its mission of creating a genuinely global job marketplace, the foundation began collaborating with a different blockchain platform.

“The Elrond Network throughput can make HUMAN Protocol operate as we originally envisioned, by allowing us to enable features for which there was no blockchain bandwidth. 

Elrond’s capabilities have captured our imagination for new features and designs. Elrond’s technical brilliance can unhinge the potential of the Protocol; this kind of innovation can help us as we seek to transform the way humans work.” Said Harjyot Singh, Technology & Crypto Director at HUMAN Protocol.

The Elrond Network is a highly scalable, fast, and secure blockchain platform built to internet-scale, which is currently capable of processing 15,000 transactions per second, and can scale to beyond 100,000 TPS.

It is also carbon negative, achieving this by offsetting more CO2 than it accounts for, meaning that every transaction on Elrond has a positive impact on the environment.

The high throughput, low latency, inexpensive transfers, rich features, and sustainability of the Elrond Network equips the HUMAN Protocol with the ability to onboard hundreds of millions of users to decentralized work pools, and dispense billions of rewards as micropayments.

Accesalaring Machine Learning

Machine learning is currently applied to approximately 1% of the problems it could efficiently solve.

The reason for this is current workflows, where machines need human inputs. Still, human beings should not have to manually select and curate what is required to reach a particular accuracy target. 

The creators of the HUMAN Protocol believe that machines should be able to ask people, and other machines, for the data they need to improve and maintain inference quality.

The HUMAN Protocol enables the world’s largest providers of human-generated labels to help AI companies build, train, and test machine learning models. 

The foundation is on a mission to usher in the next evolution of machine intelligence. Focused on teaching computers to be more human, the foundation is democratizing access to machine learning technologies.

“With hundreds of millions of people powering through the immense workload required for training neural networks, the field of machine learning is set to make enormous progress. We’re excited to contribute the Elrond Network capabilities to the HUMAN Protocol mission and establish a global network of workers operating at an internet-scale,” Enthused Beniamin Mincu, Elrond Network’s CEO.

Why You Should Care

• The HUMAN Protocol is addressing the issue of efficiency in machine learning by innovating AI technology. Learning from as many humans as possible will be critical to the development of AIs,  and is vital in coding machine-learning algorithms. 
• Teaching machines to be more human could accelerate the adoption of AI technology.
• The HUMAN Protocol Foundation is creating a decentralized, safe, and fair marketplace where anyone can request and contribute virtual work within the world’s largest labor pool.
• The Elrond Network’s blockchain platform has solved the scalability problems of Ethereum and could be the next big thing in the cryptoverse. 

On The Flipside

• The HUMAN Protocol is entering the market with vast competition among platforms providing freelance jobs and will be fighting for the same pool of freelancers. 
• The HUMAN Protocol will have to position its unique value proposition well to consolidate its position in the market.
• People from a diverse range of backgrounds participate in the gig economy, so the ambitious goal to create a global marketplace will require educating and growing their potential user base.