As you know, the world is becoming more competitive and specialisation is ever more important. The evidence suggests that human capital, or your skills, is what will drive the future new economy. In a way, society is becoming more and more a meritocracy. The focus is shifting and what you know, and how you apply it is what really matters today.

That's what Skyllz is trying to accomplish on the blockchain. They want to create a distributed, meritocratic, transparent and unified platform to assess, validate and empower human capital.

They want to make the process of talent getting access to work and work getting access to talent transparent and decentralised. In order to do that, they have created the Skyllz Distributed Platform (SDP) an open-source, public, blockchain-based and distributed skills-validation protocol.

There are basically two elements in this ecosystem that are worth mentioning:

Proof-of-Skill, which is a way to confirm that users have in fact the skills that they say they have;
SKT, the ERC-20 compliant utility token that is used within the ecosystem. This token will enable users to participate, validate and certify their skills across applications.

Problem

The problem they are trying to tackle is the Talent Discovery & Recognition.

They mention in their whitepaper that the way talent is acquiring their skills has changed. Nowadays, people use the internet (Wikipedia, how-to videos on Youtube, etc) to learn skills that before would require perhaps going to the university.

Usually, there skils are divided into two categories: soft skills and hard skills. In the case of the soft skills they are defined as desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude. Whereas hard skills are any skills relating to a specific task or situation. These skills are easily quantifiable unlike soft skills which are related to one's personality.

So, there is a market opportunity here to tackle this new talent that is arising in the internet age. This project comes from the team of Workkola, which has been working for two years to empower, boost and measure what they call Talent Branding. Talent Branding is an idea that you can replace CVs with a human-centred system of metrics, validations and endorsements based on hard & soft skills.

Skyllz Distributed Platform (SDP) Architecture

The SDP Architecture has basically three layers:

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Application layer: where STapps can participate and benefit from the ecosystem on top of the Skyllz Distributed Platform (SDP);
Service layer: providing the necessary technology and abstraction, through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support the application layer;
Blockchain layer: the Ethereum protocol has been chosen as the technological platform for the SKT, Proof-of-Skill and smart contracts.

SDP Protocol

The SDP Protocol is explained in detail in their whitepaper, however, in essence, users that are experts in a certain skill will rate other users and when the skill seems to have been acquired then they will get the Proof-of-Skill. Everyone can see what skills users have. Raters will get Skyllz Tokens (SKT) in exchange for their ratings. In turn, these Skyllz Tokens (SKT) will allow access to the services of any STapp on top the Skyllz Distributed Platform (SDP).

That's all about Skyllz. In essence, their mission is to become the biggest unified Skills Validation Ecosystem to assess talent.

Skyllz website: https://skyllz.org
Telegram group: https://t.me/skyllz
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2966145.0
Whitepaper: https://skyllz.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Skyllz_whitepaper_v1.4.pdf

Let me know your thoughts about this project in the comments, please follow me if you're not already and as always thank you for reading and I'll see you next time :)