Proof Of Work Event Record

The clearinghouse
for all scheduled
work.

A unified, cross-platform standard for verifying and allocating work.

POWER is a proposed industry-wide clearing standard for scheduled work. Every verified shift is written to a permanent, time-based record owned by the worker, and the clearinghouse allocates access to work in the order that record earns. A shared ranking mechanism means every worker's record is recognized and honored across every connected platform. This protocol inverts the traditional scheduling model — producing measurably better outcomes for employers, workers, and the communities they serve.

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⊕ Patent pending — U.S. Provisional Application

◇ Governed by POWER Clearinghouse

The architectural conversion

Every scheduled workplace
runs one-to-many today.
POWER converts it.

Today — every scheduled labor market

One employer → many workers
(One-to-Many)

Traditional scheduling is trapped within an isolated, one-to-many administrative context. An employer dictates a schedule for a siloed local roster. Worker history — their verified locational experience, job function, and capability — is economically invisible beyond the boundaries of that single employer relationship. Adding a new employer merely creates another isolated node, absorbing information asymmetry costs with no market-clearing mechanism possible.

→

POWER protocol

Many skills → many shifts
(Many-to-Many)

POWER converts this isolated context into a shared clearing layer. Every verified shift is written to a permanent record owned by the worker — allowing the cascade engine to open access to shift opportunities based on the live trajectory of their actual contribution. Because the mechanism is scale-invariant, the same rules govern a single store and an entire network. As connected platforms join, the network value compounds, triggering positive feedback loops that benefit all participants.

The core architectural insight of the POWER protocol is that a work schedule should be viewed as a cleared market rather than an employer-to-employee matching system. Rooted in the principles of mechanism and market design, this framework shifts the primary organizational unit of labor matching away from traditional employer-to-employee relationship tracking toward localized, cross-employer shift-to-skill allocation. The value of a shared standard rises with the number of participants on it. This is a structural characteristic that naturally emerge from the network rules, boundaries, and communication pathways established by the protocol. The first external claim this architecture places before the research community: the POWER Clearinghouse externalizes the computation of labor scheduling from the human mind — moving it from siloed individual administrative judgment to a shared, governed, reproducible mechanism that operates the same way for every participant, everywhere the network reaches.

The cascade opens a minimum of 14 days before the work week — producing advance schedule notice as a structural output rather than a compliance layer. Every cascade opening is timestamped on the permanent append-only ledger, constituting an immutable audit trail for fair workweek and predictive scheduling compliance. The mechanism does not just meet advance notice requirements. It proves compliance.

One-to-Many to Many-to-Many network transformation via POWER protocol

Market resolution

Every verified exercise.
Every clearing interval.
Continuously.

Resolution, in photography or computer vision, describes how much information is captured per unit of physical space. Higher resolution means more information per unit — finer distinctions, more precise representation of physical reality. Lower resolution means coarser approximation and lost detail.

The POWER mechanism increases the resolution at which labor is represented. At weekly shift resolution, you know a worker was at a location for a block of hours. At exercise resolution, you know which specific exercises were performed, at which station, verified to a defined standard. At real-time clearing resolution, you know this continuously as it happens. Every reduction in the minimum allocatable unit and every reduction in the clearing interval is an increase in the resolution of the labor representation.

Current

Shift resolution

Weekly clearing. The minimum allocatable unit is a shift. Server time and role time accumulate linearly from payroll records into the worker's portable record. The cascade routes work opportunities to priority tiers based on this foundational, three-dimensional profile.

Intermediate

Exercise resolution

Skills bisect the role as exercise definitions proliferate. The minimum allocatable unit shrinks toward the exercise layer. Clearing frequency increases as network density grows. Shifts fracture into adjacent, non-overlapping periods to isolate and verify distinct contiguous segments of role time.

The gold path

Fractal labor

Continuous real-time clearing. The discrete exercise is the minimum allocatable unit. Certified skills completely bisect every role container. Every workplace gains the native ability to clock in, verify capability, and clear a transaction instantly. The market clears continuously at maximal resolution.

The cascade's clearing frequency compresses as a direct mathematical function of market density. As connected platforms, employers, and workers saturate the network, the optimal clearing window dynamically shrinks. The system approaches Fractal Labor not through a software redesign, but as an emergent structural characteristic naturally generated by the geometric rules and boundaries established by the protocol.

The research program

These are research claims,
not marketing claims.

The POWER Clearinghouse treats the mechanism's mathematical properties the way a research institution would: each is stated at its true epistemic size and tagged honestly. Some are established by our own construction; some are grounded in published mechanism-design theorems and pending verification that our setting satisfies their conditions; some are open conjectures under active investigation. The live 2026 deployment is the empirical test. We publish the open questions rather than fence them off — and we invite the research community to help settle them.

Stable GROUNDED · PENDING VERIFICATION

No unmatched worker-shift pair would both prefer to be matched, and allocations hold without post-match renegotiation. Grounded in Hatfield, Kominers & Westkamp (2021), pending verification that our location-side choice functions satisfy its conditions — an open question we are actively inviting researchers to help settle.

Strategy-proof GROUNDED

No worker can improve their allocation by misrepresenting preferences; honest engagement is the individually rational strategy. This follows from the priority-ordered allocation on a fixed POWER ranking, which does not condition on stated preferences.

Investment-efficient GROUNDED · PENDING VERIFICATION

Workers who invest in verified skills receive better access priority at a rate consistent with approximate social optimality. Grounded in Hatfield, Kojima & Kominers (2014), Theorem 5, pending verification that our setting satisfies its conditions.

Redistributively optimal GROUNDED · PENDING VERIFICATION

Efficiency gains from better matching return to the workers who generated them, calibrated to market-design optimality conditions from Doligalski, Dworczak, Akbarpour & Kominers (2025), pending verification that our setting satisfies them.

Convergent CONJECTURED

We conjecture that matching quality improves as the singular POWER record accumulates verified work events, so that ranking precision increases the longer the mechanism runs. This is a stated conjecture under active research, not a proven result — formal characterization is an open problem we are inviting collaborators to help settle.

Polynomial-time ESTABLISHED

The cascade runs in $O(n \log n + n \times m)$. The general joint scheduling problem is NP-hard; the cascade routes around it by using priority-ordered greedy allocation on the POWER ranking rather than solving for a global optimum. The XCONE property supports near-optimal outcomes.

The items tagged pending verification and conjectured are exactly where we are seeking collaborators. Apply for research access →

Network density

Clearinghouses running
the POWER protocol.

◐ Pilot — Genesis clearinghouse

The genesis clearinghouse

The first clearinghouse running on the POWER protocol. Running the append-only ledger architecture and the credential verification layer for the network's first participants. A pilot is underway with the initial operator; its stores begin clearing their first weeks on the protocol in fall 2026.

○ Open — Participation inquiries welcome

Your platform

The POWER protocol standard is open to enterprise networks, regional workforce platforms, large-scale staffing operations, and independent industry clearinghouses looking to deploy settlement infrastructure. Nodes and connected Client Brokers inherit mutual credential recognition natively across the entire distributed network.

Inquire about connecting →

For scheduling companies and workforce platforms

A problem observed.
A mechanism designed.
Mutual participation required.

Market design — in the formal sense of Roth (2008) — is the combination of a mechanism and a user interface. The POWER Clearinghouse is the mechanism: the allocation rules, the verification architecture, and the credential standard. The formal properties of the mechanism are independent of any specific application interface. Any connected Client Broker can deploy its own proprietary interface over the exact same underlying infrastructure.

For workforce platforms and enterprise scheduling software, competing on localized features or isolated calendar matching has hit a ceiling of diminishing returns. The structural friction of the hourly market isn't a feature deficit; it is an infrastructure deficit. By decoupling the underlying clearing mechanism from the front-end user experience, the POWER protocol allows software providers to stop managing isolated scheduling contexts and start operating thick, high-frequency networks. Platforms no longer bear the overhead of verifying historical competence or chasing local roster thickness from scratch — the protocol handles clearing natively.

The POWER protocol is the formal specification for a scheduled labor clearing market that converts isolated scheduling contexts into an open, many-to-many clearing network. Its core properties — stability, strategy-proofness, investment-efficiency, and convergence — are grounded in, or conjectured from, published mechanism design theory, and are being tested against real-world market conditions. Mutual participation in this shared standard triggers immediate, non-linear returns for every connected platform, cementing the protocol as the universal infrastructure layer for scheduled labor.

Contact about connecting →

The reference architecture

The protocol provides an open-source reference implementation demonstrating a compliant Client Broker interface in a live pilot. Standardized patterns for autonomous agent integration, localized preference engines, and cryptographic exercise loops are accessible to all network participants to guide custom deployment.

Access to a workforce on the ledger

Connected Client Brokers gain instant access to a thick, pre-verified labor pool. Server time, role time, and skill time are securely compiled across all prior network interactions, allowing platforms to inherit a network in motion rather than managing an empty database. Workers gain seamless access to tokenized shift opportunities across the network without abandoning their accumulated verified work history.

One A2A call to integrate

The POWER A2A endpoint accepts a set of shifts and an anonymous roster array, instantly returning an encrypted, bitwise-optimized Power Account Routing Token (PART) to produce a Tokenized Shift. No structural database overhaul or core platform rebuild is required for initial integration. Client Brokers deepen their implementation over time as the compounding value of the credential network stabilizes local schedules natively.

Compounding structural network effects

Each Client Broker that hooks into the clearinghouse makes the shared credential standard increasingly valuable for every participant already on it. Reed's Law applies directly at the clearinghouse layer. Platforms that participate earliest capture the largest share of the non-linear returns as network thickness compounds through the server time dimension of the permanent worker record.

Research access

For academics
and practitioners.

The POWER Clearinghouse welcomes direct engagement from economists, computer scientists, and market designers analyzing many-to-many clearing infrastructure. The mechanism rests on a nine-year intellectual foundation that traces to the foundational 2017 paper; the protocol itself was built over the last year. The resulting engine is an early practical implementation of stable-matching properties operating across a distributed labor network, and characterizing exactly which of those properties hold is work we treat as open rather than settled.

The current 2026 production deployment serves as the definitive empirical test of whether these mathematical traits hold under real-world conditions. We are specifically seeking research partners who can formally evaluate whether location-side choice functions satisfy the conditions of Hatfield, Kominers & Westkamp (2021) within this high-resolution scheduling context. Anonymized matching datasets will be made available with employer consent following the field study close in September 2026.

Apply for research access →

The inventor

Rahkeem Morris

Inventor, POWER Protocol

Founder & President, POWER Clearinghouse

The person who has spent the most time
thinking about this specific problem.

Rahkeem Morris has spent his career at the center of the hardest problem in labor technology — not merely as an observer, but as a worker, an operator, a policymaker, and now an inventor.

He held thirteen hourly jobs before and during his education at Cornell University, where he graduated magna cum laude in Applied Economics and Management. At Harvard Business School, he completed his MBA and pursued research on what he termed a high-performance labor market intermediary — a distributed mechanism for physical labor allocation — conducting 42 semi-structured interviews across scheduling-intensive industries. That research was formally advised by Christopher Stanton, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, whose work sits at the intersection of labor markets, personnel economics, and the future of work. It was conducted within an intellectual environment shaped by leading scholars at the intersection of labor economics and market design at both institutions.

He founded HourWork in 2017 and scaled it to more than 10,000 active restaurant locations nationwide — reaching hundreds of thousands of workers in the immediate wake of the pandemic, when the quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry faced its most severe staffing crisis in a generation. Elliott Peranson, a pioneering architect of the National Resident Matching Program, served as an equity holder and advisor to HourWork, and his work on market-clearing design informed the company's thinking on labor allocation.

He was appointed a Commissioner on the Massachusetts Future of Work Commission, studying the structural impacts of automation, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things on the modern workforce. He served as a co-panelist alongside the U.S. Secretary of Labor and the U.S. Secretary of Education. He also served as Vice Chair and Trustee at Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology — a leading provider of stackable credentials for physical labor.

What the 2017 paper called a high-performance labor market intermediary is, in the formal language of market design, a clearinghouse. The institution he was describing already existed as a concept — one with deep roots in financial markets, medical matching, and auction theory. What did not exist was the mechanism, the credential architecture, and the network infrastructure to operate it as a scheduled labor market. The POWER Clearinghouse is the direct implementation of the intermediary that paper argued for. A nine-year intellectual foundation separates the initial paper from the protocol, which was built over the last year — solving the same fundamental coordination breakdowns, expressed first in the language of labor economics and internal labor markets, and now in the mathematics of mechanism design.

Founding research

Taming Dynamic Workforce Requirements: The Case for Establishing A High-Performance Labor Market Intermediary for Distributed Workforces of Employers (2017)

Written in May 2017 as the culminating research project for eminent labor economist Professor Paul Osterman's graduate seminar on Urban Labor Markets and Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Grounded in 42 semi-structured interviews across five enterprise organizations and approximately 62 hours of primary field research, the paper establishes the foundational case for a high-performance labor market intermediary that bundles scheduling priority directly with transferable skill certification. This work uncovers the core operational and organizational insights that ultimately became the mathematical basis for the POWER protocol.

A revised edition is being prepared for publication. Available on request in the meantime.

About the POWER Clearinghouse

Governance

POWER Clearinghouse

The POWER Clearinghouse is the neutral governing institution for the protocol — an independent standards body that holds the protocol, the credential architecture, and the worker promises. It maintains distributed credential verification infrastructure, governs protocol-wide clearing cycles, and publishes the formal mathematical standard. Operators run clearinghouses on the protocol. Future network governance will include an independent industry advisory board and a federated consortium framework as additional operators deploy nodes.

Maturity

Protocol Provenance

Built upon framework principles originally established at MIT in 2017, the clearing architecture rests on a nine-year intellectual foundation; the protocol itself was built over the last year. The network operates as a neutral utility designed to interface with any proprietary workforce platform, legacy enterprise HR system, or external application layer looking to leverage distributed, bitwise-optimized scheduling priority.

Standardization

Algorithmic Integrity

The clearinghouse enforces an uncompromising, mathematical approach to labor allocation. By translating traditional operational coordination failures into the formal prose of mechanism design, all matching cascades run via automated, strategy-proof, and polynomial-time algorithms. The structural properties of the clearing network ensure that participant allocations remain stable, non-renegotiable, and completely insulated from localized platform bias.

The clearinghousefor all scheduledwork.

Every scheduled workplaceruns one-to-many today.POWER converts it.

Every verified exercise.Every clearing interval.Continuously.

These are research claims,not marketing claims.

Clearinghouses runningthe POWER protocol.

A problem observed.A mechanism designed.Mutual participation required.

For academicsand practitioners.

The person who has spent the most timethinking about this specific problem.