By
Bhushan Akolkar
August 29th, 2022
With a new platform, people can start receiving payments in digital currency for answering emails, filling out surveys, and doing other tasks.
The San-Francisco-based bitcoin startup, 21.co, has unveiled a new service to enable users earn bitcoins by completing specific tasks. Called Lists, the feature can be used by businesses to pay professionals for responding to their requests.
“Lists are curated groups of 21.co members who share a common profession, skill, or social network,” said Balaji Srinivasan, CEO of 21. “21.co lists provide a way for the average individual to make money online. You need not be famous; you need only join lists of people with similar to start receiving targeted, paid microtasks.”
The platform, the company explained in a blog post, will help companies that need to send mass emails or surveys to reduce time spent by their employees and speed up recipient response time. If compared to traditional cold emails, the 21.co lists have much higher response rate, with 90% of respondents generally answering in 24 hours.
The startup explained how the service can be used. For instance, if you are a Stanford student, you can apply to the Stanford list to get payments by businesses that want to hire you or have you try out new apps intended for college campuses. The Python list could be used by businesses that want to complete surveys on new technologies or get expert opinions.
To use the service, you have to apply to one of the lists and after being selected you will be sent a stream of list-specific tasks that can be done to make money or fund charities. 21 has also developed some additional features, like professional biography and automatic lists joining, that will simplify the process of making money.
The tasks offered include recruiting, fundraising, market research, and sales. Businesses using the service can reach executives and investors, digital currency investors, engineers, frontend and backend developers, blockchain experts, professionals, and others. There are now more than 50 lists displayed on the 21’s website and the startup is planning to add more.
This is the second service launched by the startup this year. In February, 21 introduced a new feature to allow people replace their public emails with an inbox where people could pay to reach them. The platform, called 21 profile, compensates recipients for the time they spend on reading emails. It can be quite useful for a founder of a startup looking to contact industry leaders or raise money in seed funding.
Two years ago, the startup developed a “split chip” technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to let users sell or buy services for bitcoin. Two months after revealing the device, 21 made it available for purchase on Amazon. The pocket size of the product allows developers to make cryptocurrency transactions without taking their mind off daily routine.
