Jun 5, 2025
Throughout a career, excellent performance doesn’t always translate to the strongest CV. After spending over a decade in recruitment technology, including co-founding IT hiring platform Landing.Jobs, Pedro Oliveira turned to blockchain technology to transparently solve how recruiters can better analyze individual performance and contributions.
In 2021, Pedro launched Talent Protocol, the onchain reputation layer for builders to showcase skills and credentials. Talent Protocol makes it easy to verify a builder’s contributions, and automatically rewards builders for their work. As a reputation and rewards platform, addressing the issues of identity verification, proof of humanity, and sybil-resistance were foundational for Pedro and the Talent Protocol team.
Talent Protocol integrated Self for their Human Checkmark
We caught up with Pedro to learn more about his journey building Talent Protocol, and why Self’s identity layer was an important integration for sybil-resistance and user reputation.
What inspired you to develop Talent Protocol?
Talent Protocol exists to give real talent the recognition that they deserve. After a decade in HR tech, I saw how reputation was always fragmented, inflated, or just plain fake. We started Talent to fix that by making data public, verifiable, and composable.
When did you decide identity verification was a core pillar necessary to solve for?
We decided identity verification was crucial on day one. You can’t build reputation without strong identity solutions. If anyone can fake a profile or spam the system, then nothing works. That’s why we set up the Human Checkmark endpoint on our API early on.
Why did you choose Self as an addition to the identity layer you’ve created with Human Checkmark?
Self adds portable, privacy-first verification that works well with our system. It helps us increase trust without adding friction and filters out bots, farmers, and sybils more effectively. The Self team has also been great to work with. They’re fast, responsive, and aligned with our mission.
What’s your vision for the future of Talent Protocol?
We want to be the reputation layer of the new internet. Builder Score is the foundation, and more scores are coming (e.g., Creator Score). If you’re creating real value onchain, your data should speak for you everywhere—in every app, protocol, and ecosystem.
Learn more about Self
Start with our Quickstart docs here.
Let's talk
Self is a privacy-first identity verification platform designed for Web3 and universal apps.
Securely onboard Web3 users with private, trustless identity verification.
Enable Sybil-resistant polling for fair and transparent governance.
Check sanction lists to ensure compliance without exposing user data.
Facilitate wallet recovery with secure identity proofs.