To learn more about the pros and cons of each of these methods, I invite you to checkout “ — A handy guide to financial support for open source.”
Future Open Source Funding Models
I’m not writing this piece to talk about the past efforts. I am writing it to explore the design space of open source funding in the -era internet. In order to frame how I think this design space is fundamentally different, I’d like to offer an analogy.
We send 1000x more information to each other today than we did 30 years ago. The reason for this is that the internet (which enabled computers to send information over a global network), allowed a ton of new use cases — emails, instant messaging, message boards. I believe that 30 years into the future, we will transfer financial value with 1000x more frequency than we do today.
This value will be created, destroyed, and transmitted in a more distributed fashion than a generation past.
It is this design space that I encourage others to explore with me. Armed with this knowledge, I invite you to again look at my proposal for :
1. Ecosystem stewardship is important.
I believe that the case for ecosystem stewardship’s importance is open & closed. The value that ETH 2.0 developers and ETH 1.x developers are bringing is clear (usability, scalability, security).
It’s clear that they shouldn’t be working on ICOs. They shouldn’t be raising VC funding — they should just be focused on building great, mission-critical infrastructure for the ecosystem.
2. New, better funding mechanisms exist.
I have spent 2 years at Gitcoin exploring this design space of funding mechanisms for open source, including bounties, grants, ad-based models, and more. I’ve also been an active member of the for the last year. I’ve seen . . I’ve seen popular projects . I’ve read , a handy guide for funding open source frontwards, backwards, and upside down.
With this history, I have come to the conclusion that inflation funding is the right approach for the ecosystem.
It does not take much self-awareness to realize that not everyone in the community has the benefit of this experience. Nor do they have the trappings of following Open Source Sustainability in the fiat world. There are many ideas we can explore, together.
Come along; Let me present the most promising to you.
Proposal 1: Inflation Funding. I believe that the numbers for EIP 1789 style inflation funding are 10–100–1000. A 10% increase in inflation (2ETH per block → 2.2 ETH per block) could bring in $100m per year and employ 1000 senior software engineers. (all of these numbers are bear-market numbers)
Further information about the inflation funding proposal can be found .
That said, Inflation Funding has problems, and I have no intention of papering over them:
- How is issuance decided, administered, and governed? How do we prevent creating an entrenched oligarchy? More to come here, below.
- Software development is inherently abstract, and so proving value propositions formally is very hard. As such, bringing accountability to those who are deciding funding is an important design problem to solve.
- The coordination of who controls these funds (if anyone) before they are sent to developers is the trickiest part.
It’s possible we could de-risk the problems of issuance by only provisioning inflation funding for a test period. Such a test period would be specified as a relatively small amount of ETH (say, 500 ETH total), for a short amount of time (say, 2 months). Doing so would allow the performance of Inflation Funding administrators to be subject to review by the community before the next scheduled hard fork.
If these problems can be solved, then Inflation Funding seems well positioned to be an important addition to make to the protocol which could set up for success for 50+ years.
To learn more + join the conversation,
Proposal 2: Micro-donations to Wallets. There must be something in the Ether (pun intended), because last week Vitalik himself to fund the commons with optional micro-donations of 1 gwei/gas fee for tx.
The numbers look like this:
It’s worth noting that others in the ecosystem . For the stake of argument, let’s say that these numbers would work. $2mm per year is 1/50th of what inflation funding could bring, but it sure is a good start. To find out more about Vitalik’s proposal, go .
Microdonations has problems too. Specifically I wonder,
- How many people just turn off the fees? How many will simply fork the wallets to create no-fee versions?
- Can all projects that should be funded be funded with micro donations? Or just wallets?
- if multisend() support is needed, and how will it be implemented? How do you manage the gas costs of sending 1 wei at a time?
To learn more + join the convesation, .
3. Fund administration should be decentralized
As native funding mechanisms gain steam, we’ll need to answer how those funds are managed and organized by the community. We’ll explore a few models which have come out in early 2019, itself.
2019 is the Year of MolochDAO. Ameen Solomani, and others, have been advocating for a — a minimum viable DAO that gives grants to open source.
As of right now, MolochDAO has raised $175k. Considering the above proposals (inflation funding, micro-donations) are just at the drawing board, MolochDAO is doubling as a funding mechanism and as a way to distribute the capital fairly. Ameen sees great upside for this project.
It’s worth noting that Ameen doesn’t seen MolochDAO as a tool that can be used to , but it’s a starting point today.
Enter Gitcoin Grants & CLR matching. There is momentum in the Open Source crowdfunding, in the form of Gitcoin’s most recent offering, Gitcoin Grants. (disclosure: I am a founder of Gitcoin).
Gitcoin Grants has seen $55k in total contributions as of press time, and just announced a second round of CLR matching worth $50K. The idea? Combine crowdfunding donations (community donations) with much larger pools of matching funds which are allocated based upon where donations go.
This builds on recent research done by Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl, and Zoe Hitzing into Liberal Radicalism, a crowdfund-matching algorithm that weighs many small contributions as higher signal than some large contributions. Glen Weyl claims that CLR is the “mathematically optimal” way to fund projects that the community cares about.
Published at Tue, 19 Mar 2019 14:08:18 +0000
