In this interview, Woj.eth, founder of Mazury, explains how the Proof of Attendance Protocol (PoAP) – a widely used Web3 badge system – can be leveraged to create verifiable professional profiles for hiring and recruiting. He describes how Mazury indexes PoAPs from events like ETHGlobal hackathons, allowing recruiters to filter candidates based on real‑world participation and achievements that are not captured on LinkedIn. The conversation also covers the current limitations of contacting candidates via their Ethereum addresses, the need for additional contact data, and how Mazury plans to integrate other NFT‑based credentials (bootcamps, bounty completions) into a comprehensive work‑experience profile. Woj.eth argues that while LinkedIn currently dominates due to its scale, users will eventually prefer owning their data, enabling anonymous yet context‑rich profiles that give recruiters insight without surrendering personal data to third‑party platforms. The discussion touches on the broader utility of these signals for investors seeking entrepreneurial developers.
Chapters
future of work in the sense what matters to employees— employers in the sense, what do employers care about when it comes to hiring someone that they want to have verified about a specific person, right? Because in the future, you'll build algorithms that will be able to indicate something about someone that's very valuable. Today, what do they actually care about when they hire, when you hire, and what insights can you arise through Web3 that you're not able to arise through LinkedIn profiles? Okay.
Something that works already.
Yeah.
Okay. So the most widely used Web3 protocol, I think in general is called PoAP. It started as a— the name is an abbreviation of Proof of Attendance Protocol. And it started recently actually as this badges that you can collect after going to an event. So maybe in 2017, '16, we would go to some Ethereum meetup. I don't know if PoAP was actually live already there. Maybe it was a little bit later, but we would go to an Ethereum meetup and we would just collect these NFT badges, right? So this is how PoAP started. And now a few years forward, there's over 1 million unique people that collected some sort of PoAPs. It's by far the most used protocol again in the social Web3. Of course, trading protocols, et cetera, are more used, but in social Web3, this is the most used one. And there is a lot of different POAPs that give you a very unique insight about the given address. So for example, my favorite POAPs are coming from ETHGlobal, which is It's a series of Ethereum hackathons where people just, you know how hackathons work. They gather every month or 2 and they just hack cool stuff. And if you are a finalist or you participate in the hackathon, you get a popup. And in Mazure, we can just search through people who receive these popups. So you can immediately search through people who go to hackathons 2, 3, 4 times a year, or they even maybe won a hackathon. And this is something that you will not see on LinkedIn. One, because they just don't allow to filter by hackathon contributions. But on the second part, you just don't submit the data on LinkedIn, like hackathon data. It's something very new. And this is something that Polywork maybe tries to tackle of they allow people to submit this new data about their professional lives to their platform. But it's It's not automatic. And with Mazury, we know exactly the 500 people who got their POAPs and we can immediately search them. Another example—
Have recruiters done that after Eat Global? Yeah.
That's insane to me. Exactly.
So they just hop to Mazury, boom, boom, boom.
It's really useful for investors as well. These hackathons have really entrepreneurial developers there and investors also have to talk to these people.
Who went there? And then I find information about what? The profile? Do you connect to their LinkedIn or Twitter?
So if somebody didn't go to Mazru at all, let's start with the base case, the worst case. We just got information about the PoAP. You'll see other PoAPs that this person got. We will see other Web3 credentials that they gathered from other providers. Let's say bootcamps that offer NFT certificates, some courses that offer NFT certificates. certificates or even bounty platforms that offer a confirmation that you received, that you completed some sort of a bounty. And you will see this profile. You will not see right now a lot of contact options just because it's non-trivial yet to contact an Ethereum address. At some point it'll be easier. There will be a WhatsApp counterpart that just allows you to to message an Ethereum address instead of a phone number. It is in the making. Somebody's building this.
It's true.
It's just like a matter of adoption. So right now this part doesn't work as well, but if the person that you found created a Mazura profile, now the contact option is trivial. We collect some contact data from them. We can facilitate the connection on our side and you can actually reach them. And you have this very unique context of, What events are they attending? What courses did they complete? We are working on how can we represent your work experience. There are also some interesting protocols that are building this. But yeah, we are trying to actually build this profile.
Interesting.
And most of this is working right now. It's not as good as LinkedIn just because we don't have the LinkedIn scale of data. And LinkedIn is the biggest growth hack ever. Convince everybody to submit their information because otherwise you're not going to get a job. And it's great. It worked to this moment. But I believe that at some point people will stop giving out their data for free to LinkedIn. They will be very much more conscious about you being the owner of the data instead of just some third-party site. Yeah, they will control where is it stored, what information it says about you, etc. For example, then on Mazure, we can display that in an anonymous profile and contextualize that to recruiters.
