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Industry Analysis

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Market Analysis

Jacopo Nuti

In this section we will define the potential market for operations of the Open Web Sandbox. Here, it is important to mention that considering the specifics of the recruitment industry, our potential market segmentation is forked:

on one hand OWS will be servicing clients: projects building on top of NEAR in need of recruiting services,

and users on the other hand: contributors from all over the world seeking employment in Web 3.

Market segmentation

Clients

The blockchain industry is one of the fastest growing industries: only in 2021

2.6 billion ⁠

dollars were invested in the industry worldwide. This number has been growing steadily in the past three years. The industry keeps expanding its influence and the scope of usability throughout other sectors such as finance, data, security, and more.

The largest blockchain ecosystems are

Ethereum⁠

, Bitcoin,

Polkadot⁠

Cosmos⁠

Solana⁠

BSC⁠

NEAR⁠

Avalanche⁠

Tezos⁠

, Polygon, and

Cardano⁠

. The graph below shows an overview of all total projects building on top of each of these blockchain:

⁠

Roughly estimated, among the most developed ecosystems, there are currently 6174 projects building on blockchain.

NEAR Protocol hosts

518 of those projects⁠

. OWS chooses to target projects from the NEAR Ecosystem due to NEAR’s vision for the future of Web 3. This vision includes hosting as many diverse projects as possible in order to boost Web 3 mass adoption. This makes the NEAR Ecosystem a favourable place for emerging blockchain projects. New projects create favourable circumstances for the activities of OWS.

Users

Potential users and recruits will be sourced from the members of the NEAR Ecosystem and from the pool of worldwide online and remote workers, both from Web 3 and Web 2 communities.

Target market selection

Clients

Seeing as all of the projects within the NEAR ecosystem have or eventually will have a staffing need, OWS can service them all regardless of the project’s functionality. Therefore, OWS chooses to target all projects building on top of the NEAR protocol.

Users

When it comes to the members of the NEAR ecosystem, OWS is interested in the active members of the community, looking for ways to contribute to the development of the ecosystem. These can be selected based on their activity in the ecosystem and their personal indication of the willingness to be employed by the projects from the ecosystem; for example such willingness is reflected in the OWS database (1133 members) which OWS members become a part of after they fill in the signup form.

As for the potential recruits from outside of the ecosystem, depending on the clients’ needs, we will be searching for skilled people from all over the world looking for remote job positions online.

Target market size

Currently there are

518 projects in the NEAR Ecosystem⁠

. As mentioned in the previous alias, OWS will target all of those who have a staffing need, including the NEAR Foundation.

There are over

6 million⁠

users in the NEAR Ecosystem today and this number is growing daily. Members of the NEAR Ecosystem will make an important part of the sourcing pool of candidates for OWS.

As for the potential recruits from outside of the ecosystem, currently there is an estimation of

15.5 million⁠

of digital nomads in the USA in 2021 and this number keeps increasing.

Target market trends

Recently, the NEAR Ecosystem has began a phase of an intense expansion: only in

March 2022⁠

the amount of transactions on NEAR Protocol grew from 95 million to 110 million monthly, 1 million extra wallets were created and the number of applications building on top of the NEAR Protocol increased from 300 to 429. This prosperous development of the ecosystem means that more and more native projects will be founded in the future; all these projects will also eventually need high quality recruitment services to ensure further growth.

For our potential users, the most important trend is an increasing interest for Web 3 in general and jobs in Web 3 accordingly. Only in 2021 more than

34000 active developers⁠

joined the Web 3 movement. More and more

employees from the giant⁠

tech companies are quitting their positions to join projects in Web3, partially attracted by its rapid growth and innovations. This means that the demand for positions in Web 3 among the global population will keep on growing in the future and OWS will be there to facilitate the switch.

Buyer behaviour

Looking back at the experience of OWS from the past year, it is clear that projects from the NEAR ecosystem are mostly in need of workers with skills in the field of marketing and smm, content creation and design. Complete breakdown of skills required by projects serviced by OWS can be found in the overview presented below.

⁠

Competitor analysis

Direct competitors

At this time, NEAR Protocol does not have its own general HR agency that would work for the benefit of all projects in the ecosystem, nor does it make use of services of an external agency at this point of time. Therefore, the direct competitors of OWS would be crypto HR agencies operating within other blockchain ecosystems. For an overview of those see the Industry Structure section in

Industry Analysis⁠

Indirect competitors

OWS will indirectly compete with online recruitment platforms from Web 2 (such as

UpWork⁠

Fiverr⁠

Adecco⁠

) due to the fact that we would potentially source recruits from the similar talent pool when it comes to the Web 2 candidates even though our offers are drastically different in terms of an employment type and recruitment processes.

Future competitors

In the future, OWS could potentially compete with the

BlockJob marketplace⁠

currently building on NEAR. However, this project is focused exclusively on the building of a matchmaking platform, missing the recruitment element offered by OWS. Besides, it is yet unclear when the platform will be completed, launched and how it will be operating.

Competitive analysis grid

As NEAR keeps growing, the need to hire a professional recruitment agency to support its internal Talent Acquisition strategy will inevitably emerge. While there are multiple options available on the market today, certain time and money constraints will be present. Outside agencies will charge a relatively high price for their services; besides, these agencies will most likely be unfamiliar with the network within the NEAR ecosystem and its specifics. There will be an additional training cost to make sure agency representatives understand the ecosystem and its needs thoroughly. In case with OWS, the insider view on the events and people is already acquired by our crew, which will allow us to act precisely and deliver faster.