He’s putting your reputation onto the blockchain

Founder and CEO Weiting Liu. Photo credit: Codementor

“Unfortunately, I am not a bitcoin millionaire,” chuckles seasoned entrepreneur Weiting Liu.

That’s despite getting introduced to the digital currency six years ago by a crypto luminary.

“I actually met the founder of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, when Coinbase was just one person,” Liu tells Tech in Asia. “He sent me 0.02 bitcoin for free.” Today, that’s worth close to US$200, so Weiting won’t be quitting his day job.

Undeterred by missing the bitcoin boat, he’s now creating a cryptocurrency of his own because his four-year-old startup, Codementor, is about to dabble in blockchain for the first time.

The two main things that Codementor does – allow coders to connect with mentors and enable clients to hire coders for small projects – will soon get a crypto twist as the startup builds a blockchain system that will catalog the reputation of its coders and mentors. And payments will go through its cryptocurrency, too.

Well, that’s the grand plan revealed this week.

Join the hodlgang

To get this blockchain reputation system off the ground, Liu and his 32-strong Codementor team will launch an ICO by mid-year with its own cryptocoin called DEV. That same digital currency will be a payment option – along with a handful of other established crypto like ether – for those who’d rather not use credit cards on the service .

Why not just use Uber-style ratings to establish the reputations of Codementor users instead? “Blockchain will enable us to do certain things much more effectively,” says Liu, because it’s a tamper-proof system that’s transparent and publicly viewable.

“If there’s a dispute – in something as complicated as software development, the chance of dispute is a lot higher than, say, buying shoes online – the client can ask the developer community to review the case. We’ll rely on the developer community to settle the dispute,” explains the Taiwan-based founder.

He adds, “It can protect developers as well. For developers, that means no more clients from hell. And so if you’re a developer who works honestly, you can rely on your fellow developers to make sure you get paid for your effort. Fairly.”

Rep rap

Although he’s not the first to think of putting a community’s reputations and ratings onto the blockchain, Liu sees it as a fitting in very well with the tech business he’s already built.

“It makes sense for us to have a blockchain project because we were built to become a developer network right from the get-go. And I think having that foundational dev protocol that’s one layer underneath the existing Codementor platform, I think it does make sense. I think someone ought to build this, and we’d prefer this to be us,” he laughs.

With 300,000 developers and more than 9,000 vetted mentors on the service, Codementor is pulling in “mid to high seven figures” in revenue each year, according to the founder, though there’s no word on whether it’s turned a profit.

VCs vs ICOs