DarkEarn

Demo

About

The problem it solves ## DarkEarn — Full Pitch With Reverse Bidding --- ## The Problem Your income is permanently public on every Web3 platform. Web3 platforms publish transactional details on public ledgers. While this promotes transparency, it makes private financial data visible to everyone — forever. What that means in practice: you complete a $5,000 bounty on Superteam or Dework. The payment hits your wallet. Now anyone, forever, can go to Etherscan, paste your ENS name, and see: - Every job you have ever been paid for - Exactly how much each one paid - Which company or protocol paid you - How frequently you work Your entire income history is a public ledger entry. Employers can lowball you because they already know what you earned last time. Competitors can track your clients. Tax authorities can trivially audit you. This is not hypothetical. This is the current state of Web3 work. --- ## What DarkEarn Is **First Dollar but private.** We are what Base built but with a privacy layer that should have existed from day one. A bounty marketplace where your earnings, your clients, your work history, and your payment destination are completely hidden — mathematically, not just visually. --- ## Three Ways To Work On DarkEarn ### 1 — Standard Bounty (Poster posts, Hunter applies) Poster locks funds in BitGo. Posts bounty publicly. Hunters apply anonymously as Applicant #1, #2, #3. Poster reveals and accepts. Work submitted via Fileverse encrypted document. Payment goes to stealth address — zero on-chain link to hunter's ENS identity. ### 2 — Reverse Bidding (Hunter posts their rate, Poster comes to them) Hunter publishes a service listing — "I do Solidity audits. My rate is $3,000 per engagement. Available now." No wallet address shown. No income history visible. Poster browses listings, clicks Hire, locks funds in BitGo, and the engagement begins. This flips the power dynamic entirely. Instead of 50 hunters competing for one poster's attention — one skilled hunter sets their price and posters compete for their time. **Why this matters for privacy:** In the current Web3 world, a hunter who posts their rate on any platform immediately reveals their income expectations. Competitors see it. Future clients use it to anchor negotiations. On DarkEarn, the rate is public but the payment is private. Nobody can verify whether you actually got paid that rate, or more, or less. Your negotiating position stays yours. **Reverse bidding flow:** ``` Hunter creates service listing → Title, category, rate, availability → No wallet address shown → Listed as "Contributor #4721" — anonymous ↓ Poster browses listings, filters by skill + rate ↓ Poster clicks Hire → Locks funds in BitGo → Sends private encrypted brief via Fileverse ↓ Hunter accepts engagement ↓ Same work + payment flow as standard bounty ↓ Payment to stealth address — rate paid is never provable on-chain ``` ### 3 — Private Bids (Direct headhunting) Poster finds a contributor in the directory (Band 2+ opt-in). Sends ECIES encrypted private bid directly to their address. Only that contributor can read it. Nobody else knows the offer was made or what it contained. --- ## How Privacy Works — The Technical Stack **ZK Reputation** — Band 0 to 4 proven using Noir circuits. Your completion count, approval rate, dispute rate are private inputs. Only the band number is public. You cannot fake it. Nobody can reverse-engineer your history from it. **Anonymous Applications** — You apply as Applicant #3. Poster never sees your name until they choose to reveal. Your ENS and wallet are stored privately in contract storage — never emitted in any public event. **Encrypted Work** — Deliverables and project briefs stored as Fileverse encrypted documents on IPFS. Only the intended reader's wallet can decrypt. Not Google. Not DarkEarn. Not the blockchain. **Stealth Addresses (ERC-5564)** — Payment is mathematically derived and announced on-chain. Your ENS wallet and your payment destination have zero on-chain connection. Anyone looking at Basescan sees a fresh address receiving funds. They cannot link it to alice.eth. **Institutional Custody** — BitGo MPC wallets hold poster funds. Webhook policy verifies ZK reputation credential before co-signing any payment. Two independent privacy enforcement layers. --- ## We Are First Dollar But Better First Dollar proved the Indian Web3 talent market is real. They showed that builders in India will compete for and complete crypto bounties. They built the demand. DarkEarn is the infrastructure layer that should have been built alongside it. Same bounty marketplace. Same Base network. Same community. The difference: on First Dollar your income history is on Etherscan forever. On DarkEarn it is mathematically impossible to trace. ---

How it's made

Challenges we ran into We started with BitGo for wallet management thinking it would gave us enterprise-grade custody. But the moment we got into it the passphrase handling alone was a rabbit hole. This was a long internal argument. ENS looked like the obvious choice for identity it's web3 native, human readable, already adopted. But the more we dug into it the more problems appeared. First, ENS registration costs gas you're asking a hunter to pay just to sign up, which is terrible UX. Second, ENS is on Ethereum mainnet what if we deploy on a different chain? Third, and most importantly hunters are supposed to be anonymous. Why would we force them to register a permanent public identity just to apply for jobs anonymously? It was contradictory to our own privacy thesis. So we made a deliberate decision: ENS is mandatory only for posters because they need to be publicly accountable. Hunters get a deterministically generated codename black-fox-354 derived from their wallet address in the browser. No ENS, no gas, no setup friction. Zero. They connect their wallet and they're in. That decision cleaned up the entire onboarding flow and made the privacy architecture more honest. Future Scope AI Agents competing alongside humans. AI agents that can autonomously browse bounties, pick up work, complete it, and get paid — fully onchain, no human needed. A marketplace where both humans and AI agents compete for work side by side. An agent sees a $500 Solidity audit bounty, applies, does the work, submits the deliverable via Fileverse, and receives payment to its stealth address — zero human intervention required. Reverse bidding extends naturally here too. An AI agent posts its capabilities and rate. Posters hire it directly. The agent's payment history is as private as a human hunter's — the stealth address standard applies identically whether the recipient is a person or an autonomous agent. This is the endgame: a fully private, permissionless marketplace for work where humans and agents compete on merit, not on publicly visible income history.