What is Talan Coin?
First presented on October 4 at the 1st Parliamentary Forum of the Blockchain, the virtual currency of the Talan group is about to enter the production phase. An opportunity to present in detail the ins and outs of a project, and an initiative unlike any other: Talan Coin!
Blockchain, everyone talks about it, from mainstream media to the most innovative startups. And yet, few are the ideas that go as far as the production phase. That’s why Talan wanted to stand out and offer its employees a real application of this booming technology. This is how the idea of an internal currency was born from the desire to unite the staff of an international group around a common sharing model.
Talan Coin, that’s its name, abbreviated as 'TC', is a currency based on the blockchain, and more particularly on Ethereum. Ethereum is a widely used blockchain, and its currency, Ether, is the second largest capitalization of cryptocurrencies, behind Bitcoin. The main contribution of Ethereum compared to Bitcoin is its ability to integrate unalterable logic and business rules since stored on the blockchain itself. These are the famous "Smart Contracts", a concept that we will develop more fully in an upcoming article.
Why launch this currency?
Like all companies, Talan seeks to catalyze collaboration within it. Also, Talan wants to strengthen its unity as a group despite distinct entities and a distribution over 4 continents and develop a horizontality far from the classic vertical hierarchies. An internal currency, common to all employees, regardless of their location or hierarchical role, allows to find a common point between all the actors of the company. It is also a way to allow everyone to better exchange, including between distinct teams, thus asserting a horizontal hierarchy.
Besides, by monitoring the evolution of the exchanges of this currency and the reasons for transfer, Talan Coin allows immediate feedback of trends at Talan. The introduction of a gamification component also encourages even more use, through the organization of challenges.
What does Talan Coin look like?
Talan Coin is accessible to all group employees through a mobile application (iOS and Android) downloadable from the official stores of Google and Apple. The mobile orientation of Talan Coin guarantees a fairly wide adoption of the application and allows everyone to access the system. This eliminates any potential connection restrictions for our employees on assignment with our clients or simply on the move.
Also, to further extend the reach and accessibility of the product, a web version, desktop-oriented is being finalized, to allow a new experience, always.
And concretely, how does it work?
There are two types of wallets in circulation: personal wallets for all employees and team wallets, managed by one or more person(s) identified as leader(s) on a subject or a team.
Personal wallets can exchange money with all other personal wallets, but not directly with team wallets. The latter allow to 'reward' employees working for the benefit of a team.
How to earn Talan Coins?
As we have seen previously, the main objective of Talan Coin is to promote exchanges and sharing within the company. Thus, all actions aimed at helping Talan and more broadly facilitating daily life are likely to be rewarded in Talan Coins.
The identified axes for the moment are as follows:
Helping colleagues (occasional helping hand, technical support, etc.)
Innovate (launching a new project, an idea that can change internal processes, etc.)
Get involved in group life (participation in communities, organization of meetups, writing articles for Talan blogs, etc.)
Being nice (the morning joke, spontaneous help, etc.)
Sharing knowledge (production of training, organization of a technical presentation, mentoring and sponsorship, etc.)
Streamlining internal processes (participation in a call for tenders, cooptation, etc.)
How to give Talan Coins?
The transfer feature is available from mobile and web applications. A reason is associated with each transfer, to provide usage indicators, but also to leaving a trace in everyone’s history.
These transfer reasons also allow to create as many ranking categories in the 'gamification' section. It is planned to evolve this list according to the needs that will be discovered.
How to convert your Talan Coins?
Active participation in the life of the company allows you to earn Talan Coins, but you still need to be able to use them, among other things through a conversion into goods or services. This is how Talan relies on 2 shops of its own to provide products or services payable in Talan Coin.
Talan Campus
Historically, this is the first 'shop' identified as a source of offers for Talan Coin. Indeed, the Talan Campus already hosts all the internal and external training delivered to Talan employees. It therefore seemed natural to add new training offers not previously available, to open new opportunities.
It is not a question of making what was free since the launch of the Talan Campus pay, but rather to extend the reach of a central tool to the Talan group.
Each team leader has the possibility to add an offer in the Campus, specifying a price in TC, which makes the offer visible from the mobile and web applications. One can therefore imagine an employee wishing to attend a paid training course not previously covered by Talan and who would make a request to a team leader. The latter would then only have to buy a place at this training in € (via the classic process), and make it available on the Talan Campus with an associated TC price. The TCs collected by the sale of this offer to the employee would therefore return to the team wallet, reimbursing the € investment initiated.
Such a device also guarantees that training offers are no longer negotiated on a case-by-case basis, but open to all, ensuring greater equity and making offers available to all employees.
Talan Coin Shop
To provide offers in addition to training, we have developed a new shop suitable for selling objects and services. This 'Talan Coin Shop' allows the buyer and seller to be notified of the successful completion of a transaction.
Here too, team leaders can add offers, composed of a title, a description, an image and a price. When making a purchase, the seller and buyer are notified by email once the transaction has been successfully completed.
Talan Coin is a melting currency
To stimulate the economy of Talan Coin, we have imagined using a principle of melting currency. The concept is simple: when an employee does not spend the money he has received after a month, he loses a percentage of the sum earned. Without penalizing an employee who would be on leave for example, the sum deducted will thus be re-injected into the global system, while motivating everyone to use, exchange or spend their Talan Coins.
Indeed, for us, one of the key indicators of the success of the Talan Coin project simply lies in the number of transactions that will take place on a daily basis. This would thus indicate the adoption of the currency in the daily life of the company.
What’s next…
The realization of such a project, resolutely innovative, has not been without stumbling blocks, nor without discoveries and teachings of all kinds. We want to share our experience and new knowledge with as many people as possible, if only in view of the help provided by the increasingly important community of Ethereum developers.
