How to Give Back to the Community
Constructing a building atop a flimsy foundation will result in a self-inflicted demolition.
The Ethereum ecosystem has a problem.
We’ve created a great use-case for Ethereum by letting early-stage teams launch tokens and vie for funding, letting the crowd dictate which projects should be built. This has created a fruitful environment for developers, whose incentives are now aligned with launching products and protocols that will operate on top of Ethereum, often powered by a new token of their making. I hope to see some of these post-token-launch projects deploying their applications publicly by 2018.
While this has largely been beneficial in helping to build this colourful space, we’ve created a vacuum of developers working on core Ethereum protocol components. That’s not to say that there are no superstar developers building Ethereum commons, but rather that there’s minimal incentive for new superstar developers to build the less flashy, but extremely necessary components. Constructing a building atop a flimsy foundation will result in a self-inflicted demolition. We must avoid this outcome for Ethereum.
For a long time I pondered this problem, trying to understand how we can properly incentivize the smartest individuals in our community to build important shit. Then at DevCon 2017, it hit me in the face.
Incase you missed it, two of Ethereum’s most prolific post-token-launch companies, Status and Augur, each presented their platforms, and pledged $1M+ in their native tokens towards building the core components that the community needs.
The Augur team has since kept their word in this regard, first posting 50 different Solium linting upgrade bounties, and later posting a bounty on the Bounties Network for 2,000 REP (~$40,000 USD), for someone to build a portable Solidity debugger. This is one example of the building blocks we will need if Ethereum development aims to go mainstream.
Status has also since launched their platform OpenBounties to facilitate the payout of their team’s bounties for issues that they’ve identified, and will likely continue to grow this effort in a sustainable manner.
Several other teams have also begun posting bounties to build Ethereum commons on Gitcoin, including Truffle, Web3.py, Metamask, EtherDelta, and many many more.
These actions represent a radical departure from how startups normally build and employ open source software. In the regular startup world, if a team wanted to aid the development of open source components that they employ, they had to donate their developers’ time, which is usually in high demand. However, since we’ve created a mechanism for teams to mint their own value-holding tokens, we now have the opportunity to incentivize the creation of open-source commons, using native tokens to pay for bounties on core components.
How You Can Help
These efforts by the Augur and Status teams are highly commendable, and can hopefully represent a paradigm shift in the way the Ethereum community operates. They’ve now set an important precedent: if you’ve raised funds through a token issuance event, a subset of those funds or tokens should be donated to build core Ethereum components, to make sure we build on a foundation of rock instead of twigs.
This is a call to action for other post-token-launch companies in the Ethereum ecosystem: don’t let the tragedy of the commons befall us.
