It all started at a hackathon in Paris in 2022. Kirsten and Romain started building a product: a decentralized marketplace protocol called TalentLayer. Over years, they grew a community of 20+ open-source builders around TalentLayer. This collective raised from major angels, received substantial grant funding, hosted 20+ hacker houses, and built a strong credibility in the space as a super cracked crew of ethically-aligned devs.

In 2024, we saw many changes: we've shifted products multiple times, new friends have come and our collective has grown, teams have spun out to work on their own startups. In this, a few things have stayed the same: we love building together, we love vibing together, and we love helping one another grow.

In 2025, we started a new chapter for TalentLayer.

GM. We're TalentLayer Guild.

🇨🇴 Devcon, 2022

🇵🇹 Filecoin Lisbon, 2022

🇵🇹 ETH Lisbon, 2022

Guild (Noun): An association of craftsmen or merchants, often having considerable power or an association of people for mutual aid or the pursuit of a common goal

We're a guild working together towards some common goals:

• 💰 We want to earn "freedom money". We don't want to have to work for someone else. We want all of us to be able to just live and do what we please in our lives, and we think that the fastest way to get there is together.
• 🛠️ We want to build. We're creators and artists at heart that love to put things into the world. The act of creation is joy itself.
• 🖐️ We want to help. We want to build tech that has an impact.
• 🧠 We want to learn. We are curious. We want to learn from each other and learn together; about business, about lifestyle, about the universe.
• 🍀 We want to vibe. In the end, we all just want a home. Somewhere that accepts us and "gets us". Somewhere where people will watch out for us - not for a reason, but just because. Tribe tribe.

What do we do together?

• ⭐ We build cool shit, and try to fund it sustainably
• ⭐ We go around to hackathons together: working to win bounties
• ⭐ We host hacker houses around the world for our crew
• ⭐ We work hard to help our friends however we can: VC intros, grant farming help, advice, etc
• ⭐ We have silly inside jokes and just fuck around and vibe and do crazy shit (best benefit imo)

One of our favorite things to do is to do TalentLayer Houses, where we all hang, live, and build together. We've been to 20+ hackathons as a crew, and at most of them, we've hosted hacker houses.

We take any excuse to hang out. When we do, things can get a little crazy. When we're not hacking, you'll find us climbing trees, shooting guns, and investigating abandond ruins.

🇺🇸 Polkadot Mansion, 2025

🇺🇸 ETH Denver, 2025

🇪🇸 Barcelona Adventures, 2024

Guild Projects are any project of a guild member! Any guild member can choose to have their product listed as part of the guild's portfolio.

• We all use our networks and resources to help other guild members get what they need; whether that's fundraising, grants, staffing, or other stuff
• We publicize member projects and updates on our X profile, across 4K+ followers
• We highlight member projects on our website
• Guild members have visibility into projects so they can contribute to projects looking for help

Guild Projects are run entirely by their own team. The guild as a whole has no rights over projects, their revenues, tokens, decision making etc. The guild only exists to support, and not to take.

The TalentLayer Guild has historically been primarily grant funded. We aim this year to have two main methods of funding, shown below. This funding will be used to fund our public goods like hacker houses, product research, and other stuff.

1. Grants: Guild Members can seek grants on behalf of the guild.
2. Donations: If Guild Members or Guild Projects want to, they can donate cash or token allocations to the treasury.

Guild Treasury Management

The long-term intent is to grow a treasury from donations and grants that creates profit, and then to pay out that profit to Guild Members. This is just a vision at the moment (as we don't have any money lol), but we've got to start somewhere!

Allocations for Guild Members we want to be based on the original TalentLayer Token Allocation Framework: this framework is a method of allocating ownership of a collective project.

It's kind of like a DAO, but not really a DAO. We want to do collective funding but we also will not make things too complicated while we're small. So, this is what we've got!