( Image Courtesy of Hello Lightbulb) From 2018 to 2022, the number of digital nomads in America has more than doubled – rising from in four years. At the same time, show that younger Americans are starting to place a higher value on fulfillment than salary when picking their careers. 4.8 million to over 11 million data from polls Facts like these show us that the nature of work is clearly evolving. Can they also tell us where it’s going? Do they hide a clue to how blockchain’s growing play-to-earn (P2E) business model will fit into this shifting landscape? What will work look like in the future? Since COVID-19, there’s been a away from working in the office and toward working online. clear trend Companies have learned that this works and they’re likely to continue doing it. Remote workers save money and improve performance by allowing businesses to rent less office space and maintain a more geographically diverse and talent-rich pool of employees. This suggests that we’re headed for a world in which most work is done remotely and employees have the freedom to live wherever they want. The Growth of Freelancing The shift towards online work is just one-half of the equation. indicates that freelancers will make up the majority of the U.S. workforce by 2027. Data from Statista That fits with the idea of young workers wanting more fulfillment out of their careers. Freelancers generally have more scheduling freedom and, therefore, more time to pursue their passions. Given all of this, we can look at the future of work and conclude that it will be one in which freelancers, spread across the globe, form temporary relationships with companies who pay them on an ad-hoc basis. Pros and Cons There are some clear benefits and drawbacks to this version of the future. On the plus side, people should have newfound freedom to focus on what truly matters to them and live wherever they feel at home. On the downside, online freelancing can be a hit-or-miss business – especially when starting out. It takes time to build a stable list of clients who can provide consistent pay. This is one of the main hurdles that workers will need to overcome as they seek to transition from full-time employment to freelancing. Further complicating things, the average total account balance for Americans under 35 is . just $11,250 That’s a cushion, but it’s not likely enough to cover the average person’s expenses for as long as it will take them to find steady work as a freelancer. Put another way, as we shift to an online and freelance work economy, it would be very helpful for the average person to have a stop-gap solution for income that they can rely on as they make the transition. Enter P2E Play-to-Earn could be the key to unlocking the future of work for more people. It may not be a way to make a full-time living at this stage in its evolution. However, it could be the best secondary source of income that’s available for the many people who are starting the transition to freelance work. If you’re not familiar, P2E is a blockchain business model through which people earn cryptocurrency for playing games. It was popularized by Axie Infinity and is now ubiquitous in crypto gaming. Much of that growth has been fueled by platforms that enable traditional developers to easily create web 3.0 versions of their games. For example, products like let developers of all budgets and sizes launch their own P2E games with a ready-made set of tools. This type of infrastructure already exists and should help the play-to-earn model gain even more steam moving forward. Ankr’s SDK How might this actually work? Imagine that you’re a digital marketer who has just quit your job to begin freelancing. You don’t have enough clients to equal your old income right away, so you start looking at other online opportunities to fill the gap. You’ve heard about play-to-earn games, so you visit a platform like__ __ to look at your options. You use the site’s rankings to see the highest-earning blockchain games and decide to try one that looks interesting. Rainmaker Games You enjoy playing the game and eventually even get pretty good at it. Thanks to the unique P2E economy, you turn that skill into an income. As quickly as that, you’ve taken something that you enjoyed doing and made money from it. What about non-gamers? If you’re not a gamer, don’t worry. There will still be opportunities for you to create a secondary income for yourself in this ecosystem. There are lots of innovative earning models out there that take what play-to-earn started and expand upon it. For example, is pioneering the first party-to-earn system, which pays players for attending social gatherings in the metaverse and offline. Meta Club Society Gaming isn’t everything that the P2E model has to offer. It’s evolving rapidly and there’s no telling what opportunities will be available even a year from now. Putting it all together The play-to-earn model isn’t perfect. It can be difficult for developers to create sustainable ecosystems while preventing the steady decline of their native crypto tokens. That being said, popularizing a new technology is always difficult. The internet wasn’t the all-encompassing resource it is today when it was invented in 1983. Similarly, it took Amazon years to reach a trillion-dollar valuation. What’s clear is that play-to-earn products fit the current zeitgeist incredibly well. They sit at the intersection of blockchain, online independence, and the push for personal fulfillment. As crypto grows and more people become their own bosses, keep an eye on the pay-to-earn ecosystem. It could just be the missing link to the future of online work.
