Cerulean Marketplace: Stacks Powered Creator Economy

What’s up ya’ll? I hope everyone is doing well and are happy and healthy. If you are both of these right now, you are wealthier than you know. As Bitcoiners, It’s all about having a positive mindset and living a healthier lifestyle, right?

Today, I am continuing my focus on the Stacks ecosystem because I think it has one of the most dynamic and innovative protocols out there right now. The project I have been excited about lately is the Cerulean Marketplace, which is being created by the builders over at Zero Authority DAO.

I would describe the Cerulean Marketplace as a combination of LinkedIn meets Fiver on steroids. The problem with traditional platforms such as LinkedIn is that you must give up your data to use their platform. Data harvesting is the name of the game with these giant social media companies. They take your info, package it, analyze it, and sell it to third-party vendors wanting to target you with ads.

When the “product” is free, you are the product. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of handing over my data to mega-corporations. People should have the right to own their data and keep it private. With the creation of the Cerulean Marketplace, this will become a thing of the past. When you throw Nostr in there, we might have the chance to get rid of these data-harvesting behemoths once and for all!

The backbone of the Cerulean Marketplace is Stacks, which enables users to remain as anonymous as they want while being able to participate in the new digital gig economy that is emerging in front of our eyes.

The New Economy Is Here

The way people see and value the idea of work is changing, especially with millennials and Gen Z. The old formula of working a 9-5 with one company your entire career and retiring is completely dead. Pension plans are extinct and have been replaced by gambling in the controlled stock market with a 401k. So, on top of working your regular job, you have to understand the ins and outs of the stock market? Hard pass. God forbid that when it comes time to retire and the market tanks, you are shit out of luck. Why do you have to risk your hard-earned savings like that? Luckily, we don’t have to with the creation of Bitcoin.

More and more people are seeing through the charade and want something different. The pandemic fundamentally changed how they want to work, and it shows. According to a recent AT&T survey, remote work is set to increase from 42 percent in 2021 to 81 percent in 2024.

As you can see, this trend isn’t going away and is only accelerating. Commercial real estate vacancies are up over twenty percent in some places. It doesn’t look good for commercial property owners, that’s for sure.

So, with remote work becoming the norm, where will people find work? If you are not affiliated with a business, you are looking for project or gig work online. Needless to say, competition is fierce as you are competing with people from around the globe, who will often work for much less than what Americans will work for. It is a challenge that workers new to remote work have to contend with to succeed.

As a writer myself, especially in the beginning, it was hard to find work that paid decent enough to put food on the table and pay the bills. You have to grind every day and get your name out there.

This brings me to the next problem, which is reputation. When someone is looking to hire you in the digital space, how do they know you can do the job and do it well? There isn’t a Yelp where businesses can look you up and see the projects and the successful projects you have completed. Some may have a portfolio showing their work, but that requires more work and more time to create and maintain another profile or website. It’s all so tiresome, right? Who has time to do all that when you want to work and build a career?

Cerulean Marketplace fixes all of this. Not only can you find work and the creators and builders for your next project, but you can also do all of this while maintaining your data and privacy. You can also receive payment in a crypto-native way.

Let’s dive into what the Cerulean Marketplace looks like today. FYI, they are still in testnet, so some of the features may not be available yet, and the website is bare-bones.

Home Page

So when you head on over to testnet.zeroauthority.xyz, you will be greeted by the home page. On it, you will see various services that are being offered. Right off the bat, I would find this incredibly helpful if I were looking for a specific type of service, such as developer or consulting. Below these categories, you will see profiles looking for offers.

I hope they keep this page layout. I think it highlights the essence of what Cerulean marketplace is about.

Make An Offer

So, if you are looking for someone to write a blog post for your business, you would go to the offer page and list the service that you are looking for. Here, the power Stacks smart contact comes into play. When you create a fixed contract, you use stacks to create a smart contract between you and the service provider. The funds are locked in a smart contract until services have been rendered to satisfaction.

As you can see, it is pretty basic right now, but you can see where you can enter what you are looking for and what you want done.

After that, you will be greeted with something like this.

This was a test transaction between me and xyzero.btc, one of the masterminds behind this fantastic project. So here, I can accept or decline the job to write a Bitcoin blog post for 10 STX.

Here is what it looks like after the offer has been accepted. Again, this is all testnet and is subject to change.

Unfortunately, I can’t walk you through the entire dapp as not all the functions are working right now. I just wanted to highlight what is on the horizon in the Stacks ecosystem—lots of big things going on right now. Cerulean Marketplace is one to keep an eye on as I think they are on to something and will be a game-changer for creators and projects looking for talent. I can’t wait to see the finished product!

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