Decentralizing the Sharing and Gig Economies

The way the world works has undergone a sea change with the rapid growth of both the sharing and gig economies. According to PwC, the gig economy will be $2.7 trillion in size by 2025, of which $1 trillion will be in Asia. The sharing economy will have created $335 billion of value in the same timeframe. 

This has all been made possible by the digital revolution. But whole swathes of the digital market have been seized by monopolists and large companies: Fiverr and Upwork dominate the marketplace for freelancers, as Uber does for transportation and Airbnb does for home rentals. These companies do this by centralized systems that charge high fees, lock in user credibility and transaction data and create high barriers to entry, reducing the efficiency of their marketplaces. If we are to maximize the benefits of the sharing and gig economies in the next wave of creative sector digitization, we need to decentralize the system.

The digital creative sectors are booming. Take for example esports, where there is a global ecosystem of nearly half a billion people as players, creators, servicers, gamblers, traders and scouts. Overall, people watched 100 billion hours of gaming on YouTube in 2020 via more than 40 million active gaming channels. More than 80,000 of those channels have a minimum of 100,000 subscribers. 

Introducing TimeCoin

To ensure that digital assets and rewards are efficiently and fairly shared among users, contributors and service providers, we have created the decentralized sharing economy protocol, TimeCoinProtocol. This is used by our dapps TimeTicket, eSportStars, esports matching and our NFT marketplace. 

TimeTicket is an intermediary between people who want to provide services by selling their own time and people who want to purchase it. TimeTicket allows users to buy and sell personal time in 30-minute units. It has grown rapidly since the service launched, with the total value of merchandise sold on the platform having increased more than 30-fold in the last three and a half years with half a million users.

In October 2020, we released eSportsStars dapp, our first esports vertical. This is a matching platform for esports players and fans around the world. It lets them take part in tournaments, find opponents, organize tournaments and bet on esports games. Crucially, it lets users earn money by playing in an esports game or by staking a favorite player, streamer or VTuber.

Given the rapid growth of eSportsStars and the new NFT functionalities in TimeTicket, we decided to sell our own token, TimeCoin (TMCN). TimeCoin allows us to monetize the relationship between creators and fans. Creators will receive TimeCoin as a reward for selling NFT digital items and services, for posting videos and for planning, holding or making ‘Let's Play’ (LP) videos of games. TimeCoin will also be given to their subscribers and viewers. These fans can support creators through tipping and sponsor-staking, and receive a TimeCoin income stream while supporting the creators. The TimeCoin gained through staking will be split 50/50 between the creators and the sponsors. Meanwhile, investors can access TimeCoin on BitMart, BitForex and BiKi, with the token coming to other exchanges shortly.

On May 21, 2021, TimeCoinProtcol launched a new project called GameTomodachi (“tomodachi” means a friend in Japanese). GameTomodachi lets game players find new game friends to play with or against. Users can enjoy playing games with influencers such as YouTubers, VTubers and esports and professional players. While they are playing games, they can also chat. An influencer can sell a ticket to play a game with a fan, share pictures and video and sell NFT goods as well.

These kinds of digital ecosystems mean that TimeCoin investors can also receive a stream of income while supporting creators around the world. It brings together the rapidly growing worlds of digital creativity and tokenomics, heralding a new era of innovation.

With the success of the esports vertical, we welcome other third-party users who want to develop applications in other areas. This is driven by our belief that for a true peer-to-peer sharing economy to work, it needs to be decentralized and built on a trusted ecosystem.