By Jonathan Chester for LTP

-Launching a new payment-verified reputation system that allows workers to leverage their payment data to acquire new clients without going to freelance marketplaces

-Launching 5 new currencies

Since July of 2014, we have been hard at work ensuring that our customers have the best wage experience they could possibly have. Prior to Bitwage, employees, freelancers and contractors were required to receive a wage from their employers and clients in whatever format their employers or clients chose. Through our Bitwage Invoicing solution, we have changed this paradigm, allowing workers to free their wages by giving them the ability to choose how they would like to receive their wages. Whether they want to receive faster, cheaper international wage payments or if they would like to receive part of their wages in alternative forms of value, such as gold, silver or other digital assets, Bitwage enables the workers to have the choice.

It turns out that our customers, the workers, freelancers and contracting companies, have another problem in addition to slow and expensive payments. That problem is getting more clients. For international workers (for instance, Brazilians) trying to acquire new clients across borders (for instance, in the United States) often run into trust issues. The US customer has no way to trust or verify the value of the Brazilian freelancer’s unverified resume with names of universities and employers that no one in the United States even knows. So instead, the freelancer goes to a freelance marketplace where they will pay up to 20% of their wage to increase a reputation that gets stuck on that platform.

Because the sender does not have to sign up to Bitwage to pay our workers, workers can receive wages from all of their income sources through us. With those payments, comes a lot of interesting data that our workers can leverage to build trust with new potential clients, such as who they worked for, for how long and for how much.

My Employer Platform

This is why we are excited to announce the launch of our new “My Employer” solution. M.E. is a payment-verified professional profile that allows workers to port reputation from freelance marketplaces and directly from the clients they work with to build trust and acquire new international clients. By showing potential clients payment-verified information, all of which besides payments staying in a single currency can additionally be verified on the blockchain, freelancers and contracting companies can prove they worked for the companies they claim to have served as well as to show how much other clients have valued their work.

Review-based reputation systems are a far less accurate reputation mechanism than payment-based reputation systems. While review-based systems are very subjective and easy to manipulate with fake accounts, payment-based reputation systems are based purely on the monetary value a worker has earned and are very hard to manipulate as money needs to be sent to earn reputation.

How does Bitwage M.E. work? 

Once someone signs up, users are able to leverage all of the payment reputation they have acquired over the course of receiving wages through Bitwage. The user can build a profile that shows their employers, ranges of how much they have been paid, how long they were receiving payments as well as badges. These badges include a Bitwage Verified badge, which can be put on websites, resumes and other profiles to help workers build trust off of the M.E. platform; a top 10% Volume and a top 10% Transaction badge, which are awarded to the top 10% volume generating and transaction receiving workers on Bitwage. Users can choose to show or hide their badges and employer information at any time. Workers can add additional information, such as profile pictures, biographies, one-liners and uploaded resumes.

Each profile has its own personal URL, such as https://www.bitwage.com/jonathanchester and has three settings: public, private and link only. Public profiles are shown on a public listings page which anyone can view without signing up at https://www.bitwage.com/workers. Worker profiles are searchable via name, employers they’ve worked for, or any keywords from their profile. There are also filters for types of worker, badges earned, hourly fees, and country. Link only profiles hide your profile and can only be seen if someone has your specific M.E. profile link. Private profiles are completely private. Potential employers and clients can offer work and message workers directly through their profiles.

At Bitwage, we take privacy very seriously. All of our user’s data is kept private and only used as described in ourcookies & privacy policy. M.E. customer data is used, in addition for the reasons described in our cookies & privacy policy, solely for the purpose of helping freelancers, contracting companies and employees acquire new clients or employers.

By combining our fast, low-cost payment processing solution with the ability for our customers to leverage their own data, we will empower workers all over the world.

New Payment Outputs 

Along with Bitwage M.E., we would like to announce new payment outputs. In addition to Brazil and Philippines, we are officially launching local currency payouts in the US, Eurozone, Argentina, Vietnam and India. This means that freelancers and contracting companies working with the US or European companies can now receive their wages in USD, Euro, BRL, PHP, ARP, VND and INR without requiring their clients to sign up through our Bitwage Invoicing solution. International workers in the US, Europe, Brazil, Philippines, Argentina, Vietnam and India can now all join the workers receiving wages through Bitwage from the likes of Google, Facebook, GE, Upwork, Gigster and the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization.

Costs 

With the launch of the Bitwage My Employment platform and our new outputs, we plan to launch a new set of fees. All local currency outputs will have a low, 1% fee. This is incredibly low considering we have some of the best exchange rates in the world, saving users up to 5% or more while delivering funds as fast as next day.

Bitwage M.E. is going to cost a low $9.99/month and, at least for the first year, will also waive the 1% local currency output fee.

New Milestones

Back in September of 2015, we were happy to announce that we had finally processed over $1m in payrolls. Just one year later and we have hit a brand new milestone for the development of Bitwage. This last month, the month of August 2016, we have done over $1m in payroll transactions alone. In just one year, we went from performing the number of transactions we had fulfilled in one year to just one month. This is a really exciting moment for us here at Bitwage and we are so happy that all of you can join us on this momentous occasion.

Blog post link here:  https://blog.bitwage.com/2016/09/23/bitwage-releases-payment-verification-platform-my-employer-five-new-output-currencies-and-hits-new-transaction-milestone/

Jonathan Chester, Founder & President:

“Two of the biggest issues for contractors are dealing with payments and getting more clients, especially for freelancers and contractors working in an international context. Traditionally, these two functionalities have been separated. Now, just by receiving payments faster and cheaper, workers in the US, Europe, Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, Argentina and India will be able to build a reputation which can be leveraged to acquire new international clients.”

About Bitwage:

Bitwage is a blockchain-powered international wage payment and payment processing solution that delivers funds across borders same/next day with fees as low as 1% (in comparison to bank transfers that take between 5 to 15 days in countries like Brazil and have fees averaging 8% according to the world bank). We do this without requiring the employer to sign up to our platform, so freelancers are already getting paid through us from organizations such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Upwork, Gigster and the world health organization. We currently receive wages from companies in the US, Europe and the UK and payout all over the world.  We were recently named one of the top 21 blockchain companies in the world.