18,000+ monthly users, 88% completion rate, coders paid up to $62 an hour, this blockchain project is creating the future of work
Since launching in 2017, has become a key node between the growing and open source communities, on-boarded thousands of developers into the world of Web3, and has propelled the ecosystem forward one , , , and at a time to the tune of over $1 million created in value on the platform.
The Gitcoin team, led by Boulder, Colorado-based Kevin Owocki, has long since proven a use case in monetizing and incentivizing open source development work, but the big picture is focused on the future of work, decentralizing the production of technology, and creating a flourishing suite of products that connects coders to funders while bringing open source to the community.
With over 18,000 monthly users, an 88% bounty completion rate, a 7 day median turnaround, and an hourly rate distribution that tops off over $60, Gitcoin has helped coders around the world get involved in projects like , , the , and even contribute towards scaling solutions for 2.0.
We spoke with Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki about the future of work, , and the secret to user …
Congratulations on passing $1 million in platform value. User adoption is the holy grail of blockchain at the moment. To what do you attribute Gitcoin’s achievements in that regard?
We’re either lucky or good! We owe a lot to Joe Lubin for believing in us, and I owe a lot to the Gitcoin team, who work tirelessly to build products that people love. The luck part of the equation comes in that, I’m a software engineer myself, and we built Gitcoin for software engineers. I think we got lucky that at this stage in the infrastructure development of , everyone needs software developers. As opposed to someone who is building a retail product on the , the time is now for Gitcoin. It’s wonderful to have active users, to have active users that are my “tribe” — software engineers — and to be contributing to the growth of two amazing technological phenomenon like Open Source and .
What is Gitcoin’s current suite of products?
Gitcoin launched as a marketplace for — a place where developers could *git* coins. Gitcoin is built on top of Github. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. All we did was build an incentivization layer that’s built around Github’s collaboration layer. Anything that you can express as a Github issue — new features, bug reports, security bounties and updates to documentation — can be a bounty on Gitcoin.
But the biggest advantage of Gitcoin bounties is that it’s a try-before-you-buy way of hiring. You can start with small bounties, discrete tasks, and move on to tasks that require more situational awareness. As you increase trust between a coder and a funder, there are more advanced tasks delegated.
We’ve since evolved into a double-sided market that connects funders to coders in a bunch of different contexts. We launched Gitcoin , , and we now have a product called that allows software developers with an audience to place advertisements on web properties. It’s been really great to dogfood our products, not only internally at ConsenSys with teams like Metamask and Truffle, but with the Foundation themselves, and other top tier projects in the space.
Can you explain more about Gitcoin Grants?
Gitcoin Grants launched in January, and we’ve done a little bit over $100k in grants since then. Gitcoin Grants is basically a decentralized Patreon that’s meant to fund open source software. The idea is that if you’re a team that’s providing value to the world, it can be a crowdfunding presence for you. I think has a couple different advantages here. Patreon suffers from a deplatforming problem that a number of social media platforms suffer from. You won’t see that on because it’s an immutable .
We recently launched CLR Matching on Gitcoin Grants. According to Glen Weyl, CLR is the mathematically optimal to fund public goods that the community cares about. The way it works is that Gitcoin will match your contributions to open source software, for example ETH 2.0 and ETH 1X. The CLR matching algorithm ensures that projects who have a broad base of support are funded, rather than those with just whales supporting them.
How does Gitcoin play into the future of work?
If you believe in the premise of , and that we’re moving from an industrial economy to an information economy, it seems to follow that the way do work will change a lot. I think that elastic workforces — which is what Gitcoin is powering — is certainly one of those things, but I’m also excited about nested capitalism and other value streams that can enable for 21st century workers.
The gig economy is empowering in many ways, but gig apps have developed a bad reputation. We’re really excited about this new category that we’re calling dynamic workforce assembly. The primary difference is that the gig economy is just gigs. Dynamic Workforce Assembly (DWA) is a gradient between small tasks to part-time contracts, to being-full time. If you believe that will change the way we pay each other, then it follows that in the future many many jobs will be paid through technologies.
The other trend that I’m really excited about with the future of work is nested capitalism: Instead of viewing an organization as a large monolith, viewing it as a network. Joe Lubin always talks about how we’re building an organism in Web3, and I think that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. I’m excited for what the world looks like in 5–10 years out when these ideas have more traction.
Published at Fri, 12 Apr 2019 16:55:38 +0000
