Whitepaper
Maiev
Maiev is the social layer for onchain talent. Builders earn public, verifiable reputation in the skills they practise. Their work history is committed to Solana and validated by the colleagues and employers who saw the work. Companies find them on per-skill leaderboards and headhunt them directly, paying per hunt in $MAIEV. There are no CVs and no recruiters.
01The problem
Hiring in Web3 runs on DMs, pseudonymous handles and claims nobody can check. The tools borrowed from traditional hiring make it worse.
- Unverifiable data. CVs and social profiles are self-reported. Titles, dates and skills get inflated, and checking them costs days of reference calls.
- Middlemen take a large cut. Agencies charge 15–25% of first-year salary for sourcing that verified data could mostly automate.
- Stale availability. “Open to work” badges are set once and forgotten, so outreach goes to people who never reply.
- Meaningless endorsements. One-click endorsements on existing platforms carry no accountability and little signal.
AI-driven recruiting has mostly made the noise louder: more automated outreach, more keyword-matched CVs, and still no reliable way to tell who is actually good.
02What Maiev is
Maiev replaces the CV with a living, verified profile and replaces cold outreach with a network that rewards real work.
- Every Web3 job in one place. Open engineering and security roles from companies’ public job boards, plus roles posted on Maiev, matched to your skills and updated hourly.
- Your rank in a minute. Sign in with GitHub and Maiev estimates where you’d rank from your public work, then pre-fills a private draft profile for you to review.
- Verified profile. Roles, skills and linked repositories. Every role shows how it was verified.
- Per-skill leaderboards. 91 public rankings across three areas at launch: development languages, security and AI. Each board ranks worldwide or by region, all time or rising this year.
- Hearts and validations. Hearts are quick appreciation for a specific piece of work from anyone who has unlocked them. Validations come only from people who worked with you.
- Responsiveness meter. Open contributors earn a 0–100 score from how reliably they answer. Companies see who actually replies.
- Hunts. A company sends one role to one contributor, with salary and location up front.
- Social layer. Follow contributors and companies, and post short text updates of up to 145 characters about what you shipped, fixed or learned.
03Onchain work history
Every role moves through four states. Each step up is signed, and nothing can be quietly edited afterwards.
What goes onchain
Records use the Solana Attestation Service. Only a fingerprint of each record (a SHA-256 hash), its signers and the time go onchain. The role details live in Maiev’s database, where anyone can check that they still match the fingerprint, and where personal data can be deleted on request.
Versions, not rewrites
Editing a committed role creates a new version. If the earlier version was validated, the new one starts self-attested and is marked “Edited after validation” until it is confirmed again. Earlier versions and their signatures stay visible in the record’s history. Signers can revoke, and revocations stay visible too.
No crypto steps
Each contributor gets an embedded Solana wallet behind their GitHub, Google or X sign-in, run by a non-custodial provider. Maiev never holds user keys, co-signs every record and pays every network fee. Nobody needs a wallet app, a seed phrase or SOL to use Maiev.
04Skill scores and leaderboards
Every contributor gets a score from 0 to 1,000 in each skill, built only from signals that are expensive to fake.
| Signal | Weight | What counts |
|---|---|---|
| V · Validations | 50% | Onchain validations from people who worked with you, weighted by the validator’s own score in that skill. |
| E · Evidence | 30% | Verified roles that used the skill, signed commits in linked repos, deployed contracts, published audit reports, confirmed bounty payouts and contest results, depending on the area. |
| H · Hearts | 20% | Appreciation for specific work, weighted by the giver’s credibility, with diminishing returns. |
All signals decay with a 24-month half-life, so rankings reflect current skill. The top three on each board stand on a podium: #1 Legend, #2 Champion and #3 Vanguard. Entering the top 100 of any skill needs validations from people at three or more different companies.
05Keeping ranks honest
Hearts are quick to unlock and then unlimited. Abuse is handled by weighting and detection rather than quotas.
- One-time unlock. A verified human with real Git activity, or a Google or X account at least 7 days old.
- Weighted givers. Git-linked accounts and givers with strong scores count more. New givers ramp from 0.25 to full weight over 90 days.
- Reciprocity discount. Mutual hearts or validations within 30 days count at half weight.
- Ring and burst detection. Dense groups that mostly heart each other, and sudden bursts, are held and reviewed.
- Company cap. No more than 30% of a skill score can come from one company’s colleagues.
- Followers don’t rank. Followers and post hearts are social only. They never change skill scores, so buying an audience can’t buy rank.
06Hunts and the responsiveness meter
A hunt is one role sent to one contributor: title, salary band, location and a short pitch. It costs $2.50 USD, paid in $MAIEV at the live rate.
- If the contributor doesn’t open it within 3 days, 25% comes back to the company.
- Closed and Away contributors can’t be hunted. Hunts below a contributor’s salary floor or outside their locations show a warning before sending.
- Companies earn one free hunt for each alumni role they verify.
Open contributors earn a responsiveness score over the last 60 days of hunts:
“Not for me” counts as a full answer, so declining honestly is rewarded. A low score lowers search ranking to as little as half weight. It never hides a profile. Hunts that break a contributor’s stated preferences never count against them.
07Companies
Every company proves it controls its domain before it can hunt, post roles or verify alumni, through a DNS record or a code sent to an address at that domain. Free email domains are refused. Maiev re-checks every 30 days, and contributors always see the verified domain.
When a contributor answers “I’m interested”, Maiev creates the intro call itself, with a Google Meet link from a Maiev-owned calendar. Until that first call has happened, links typed into chat are blocked.
08$MAIEV token
$MAIEV is a standard SPL token on Solana, used to pay for hunts. Every hunt is priced in US dollars and paid in $MAIEV at the live rate, so the cost to companies stays fixed while the token amount moves with the price.
| Mechanic | How it works |
|---|---|
| Fee | A 1% fee on every buy and sell. |
| Buyback and burn | 25% of that fee buys back $MAIEV and burns it, permanently reducing supply. |
| Hunts | $2.50 USD per hunt, paid in $MAIEV. At $0.02 per token, that is 125 $MAIEV. |
| Buying | Companies buy on the open market from inside the app, by card or wallet. The exchange step is handled for them. |
| Spent tokens | Go to the Maiev treasury. |
| Refunds | 25% of a hunt returns to the company if it isn’t opened within 3 days. |
| Contributors | Never need the token or a wallet app to use Maiev. |
Total supply, allocation and the launch mechanism will be published in this paper before launch.
09Roadmap
| Phase | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 · Validation | Clickable prototype, interviews with contributors and companies, landing page and whitepaper published. |
| 2 · Private beta | Design-partner companies verify their own teams, seeding the first verified profiles. Records on Solana devnet, then mainnet. |
| 3 · Public launch | Open sign-ups, hunts and $MAIEV live, leaderboards and feed public. |
| 4 · Expand | Native apps, new skill areas (chains and ecosystems, DeFi, ZK, infrastructure), more markets. |
10Disclaimer
This is a draft. Everything in it, including features, pricing and token mechanics, may change before launch. It describes a product in development and is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any token, security or other financial product, and it is not financial, legal or tax advice. $MAIEV is intended to pay for hunts on Maiev; no return, price or liquidity is promised. Token availability may be restricted in some jurisdictions. Maiev will only ever publish official addresses and announcements on maiev.xyz.