Radicle

The initial building blocks of the web were open protocols. Open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP are community governed, allowing developers to reliably build on top without the risk of arbitrary changes enacted by a central intermediary. This fostered innovation and gave rise to the first set of large internet properties.

This innovation also led to the success of platforms that initially added massive value to its users, but that would eventually become extractive and turn against their users. These platforms capture attention and data of users at a scale that makes it hard to compete against. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon became the gateway to the web, setting the standards and becoming the arbiter of what gets distributed and what is possible to build on top. This presented a much more centralized version of the web, and a shift of the internet from open protocols to privately-owned platforms.

These monopolies pose the dangers we are all familiar with, but most of all, they also harm innovation. The similar evolution holds for platforms that host code. Most coding platforms heavily rely on open protocols (git, ssh, etc.), but have then built closed gardens around them and are privately-owned.

Web 3 offers the opportunity to reverse this trend and reignite bottom-up innovation. Crypto networks and blockchains align incentives in that they offer users a stake in the growth of a network through participation and community-governance. They also address some of the shortcomings of open source software (OSS). Most OSS projects are unfunded or go without financial or institutional support, thus leading to struggles in their development and especially their maintenance. Other OSS projects are heavily dependent on the support of dominant private entities. By providing built-in economic incentives to developers through tokens, crypto networks have the potential to address this issue.

The reliance on OSS and the number of projects and contributions has never been greater. Still, Web 3 developers are mostly building behind the walled gardens of Web 2 code hosting platforms such as Github or Gitlab and are thus subject to the possibility of censorship or arbitrary changes.

Radicle provides a solution in this paradigm, tying together an economic incentive layer for the development and maintenance of open source projects while providing a resilient infrastructure for code collaboration. Radicle is the decentralized entry point to Web 3 for developers. Built exclusively on open protocols, Radicle allows decentralized communities to create, govern and fund their open source work, all in one experience.

Investing in Radicle

We invested in Radicle in early 2019, but first met Ele and Alexis in 2017 when they first started conceptualizing the core ideas around the project. We got in touch through a mutual friend who then became one of the first team members. We followed the team closely ever since. Immediately intrigued by the vision, we grew impressed with their depth of exploration, from token economics to incentive mechanisms to researching consumer co-oops and the underlying governing of the commons, here applied to free open source software.

Now after its first weeks in beta, the project has already attracted great interest from well respected devs and institutions and has shown rapid growth. With the Ethereum integration and launch of its Rad token, we believe it will ride the wave of massive trends that are enfolding right now:

• De-platforming — Concerns around centralization, privacy and censorship in critical infrastructure or any wide-spread software are already well articulated by both consumers and enterprises, but will only continue to rise. Building resilient code infrastructure that respects users’ freedoms and greatly reduces the reliance on any centralized gatekeepers or third parties presents an incredibly appealing alternative. Radicle provides the open infrastructure to developers building the next version of the web, re-architecting key internet services and creating entirely new ones.
• Developers as the OG creator — Developers will be one of the first audiences to transition to this future. While historically, the creation of open source projects was dependent on non-sustainable financing models based on donations, permanent company sponsors or bounties, Radicle provides developers with a fully independent economic incentive layer to create, develop and maintain code. It rewards contributors sustainably and transparently, utilizing the newly developed financial infrastructure (Bitcoin, Ethereum and DeFi), resulting in a true creator economy.
• User ownership — Community-owned platforms offer the potential to better align value creation and value capture. Whereas in traditional platform businesses, users and owners are two distinct groups, with owners capturing most of the value that users create for the platform, community-owned platforms give users access to participate in the value accrual. Radicle is an open source code collaboration platform that is owned by its users. Radicle facilitates the creation of an economy around open source contribution which isn’t governed and taxed by a central entity. It does so by enabling developers to create on top of a fully decentralized stack, by providing a fair and sustainable economic reward for participation, and by making it valuable to govern the resources of a network.

Radicle is a novel approach to growing our digital commons, fostering innovation and making the web a more interesting place.