Let’s face it, we have a love/hate relationship with the gig economy. We love the independence, the variety, the spontaneity, and sometimes…even the money.

A lot of times though, we have a feeling deep down inside that we are being taken advantage of, manipulated and squeezed unnecessarily. The concept of gig work is really good, almost an ideal form of capitalism. But because of the pressure of the current form of capitalism, it seems to have gotten exploited.

Could we rewrite the rules of gig work? Why not? How about a dapp running on Cardano that could host almost any type of gig work and aspects of the sharing economy. With the right interface, it could accept inputs from people in need (deliveries, day labor, goods, services, etc.) and from the providers of such.

The offer/acceptance of terms could be a combination of immediate, delayed until fulfillment, or even a continuous flowing payment method. Payment could be in fiat or Cardano with an immediate conversion mechanism from one to the other, depending on the person’s preference.

Imagine you get struck with a little wanderlust, and you take off to a new town or city, arriving with little more than the clothes you have on. You look on your AdaWorks dapp and find a car that you can rent for evening driving for a Uber-like gig. The car is from someone that knows once they are home from work, they are not going to be using the car the rest of the evening. You rent the car, otherwise a wasting asset, and drive that evening when most of the driving gigs happen anyway. A win-win!

The car use is part of the shared economy and the actual driving would be part of the gig economy. The payment in kind would flow through the dapp, either in Cardano or fiat, with automatic conversions happening for the settlement layer.

Next of course, in your wanderlust journey, is you need a place to sleep or live. The dapp version of Air BNB would fit the bill.

I could go on and on about the different goods and services it could provide but will save that for future articles. The main framework here is that by using Cardano and an associated dapp, you can eliminate big tech middlemen. Eliminate banks (money is flowing from one wallet to the next). You keep almost all of your money earned, and thus you can make more or charge less to the customer to get more work and/or save the customer money, while still pocketing more.

This is a thought experiment at the moment, and I intend to expound on it in future articles with more conceptual ideas and also some technical aspects as well, so stay tuned.

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