A concise overview of the TruCol protocol.
The TruCol protocol presents an improvement of market efficiency and developer autonomy by decentralisation and automation of test-driven development. The protocol promotes inclusive, fair and accessible work, by enabling developers to participate in the market regardless of their circumstances. Employers publish a smart contract with a bounty for deterministically verifiable development tasks which are fit for solving by external parties. Developers from all over the world are able to complete these tasks and get rewarded automatically when the requirement of the smart contract is fulfilled. The protocol thus removes the middleman and costly fees, and stimulates an open and fair development market.
Traditional bounty-based platforms require a modicum of trust and an often costly middle-person. For the market of deterministically verifiable test-driven development tasks, decentralisation eliminates the necessity for trust and a costly platform that mediates the collaboration. This reduces the transaction costs of such tasks. Additionally, it enables anyone in the world to participate, as long as they have access to the test specifications. This means hiring bias is eliminated for these tasks, and the thresholds to getting work are reduced. To illustrate, the traditional solution requires companies to do some promotion to attract intelligence that is able to solve their tasks. Next, an employee has to apply. Then the employer needs to filter the applications to find a suitable candidate. If a match is made, the two can reach a work agreement. They then have to trust each other to live up to their promises and disputes can be settled through law and regulation. All these activities can be omitted when using the TruCol protocol for deterministically verifiable tasks, such algorithmic optimisations of heuristics of NP-hard problems and applications of artificial intelligence.
By providing a protocol instead of a service, we empower the users financially whilst increasing their autonomy by removing the need to rely on an over-arching bounty platform that takes money from the work of users. Sharing a completely open and deterministic payout protocol removes bias from the hiring process. We believe the early-adopters on the employer side of the protocol can gain knowledge and experience that may give them a tactical advantage in the domain of requirement specification for AI engines like GPT-3. It can be difficult to identify which development processes in a company are suitable to offload into the TruCol protocol. It can be difficult to write air-tight test specifications in sponsor contracts. We intend to work as a consultancy to assist companies in successfully navigating these challenges to help them get the most out of the TruCol protocol.
The protocol can be implemented on smart contracts of various chains, such as Ethereum. The employer can determine their desired level of decentralization by choosing whether they want to publish the test specification completely decentralized on-chain, or make use of GitHub, continuous integration and oracles to verify the completion of the task.
We are intending on submitting our whitepaper to a scientific peer reviewed conference. If you would like to pre-read the whitepaper, please contact us and we’ll email you the pdf.
Currently, we have a MWE of the TruCol protocol in Solidity-Solidity format using Chainlinks verifiable random function to prevent hardcoding. Our biggest bottleneck right now is in automatically deploying a self-hosting docker/virtualmachine (instead of shell) GitLab CI. If you happen to have some bash skills, feel free to improve our GitLab-CI deployment script.