Gitcoin Founder Kevin Owocki Explains the Strategy as Platform Passes $1 Million
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, Gitcoin has become a key node between the growing blockchain and open source communities, on-boarded thousands of developers into the world of Web3, and has propelled the Ethereum ecosystem forward one Bounty, Kudos, Codefund, and Grant 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 blockchain 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 blockchain 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 Metamask, Truffle, the Ethereum Foundation, and even contribute towards scaling solutions for Ethereum 2.0.
We spoke with Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki about the future of work, Ethereum, and the secret to user adoption…
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 Ethereum, everyone needs software developers. As opposed to someone who is building a retail product on the blockchain, 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 Ethereum.
What is Gitcoin’s current suite of products?
Gitcoin launched as a marketplace for Bounties — 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 Grants, Kudos, and we now have a product called CodeFund 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 Ethereum 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 blockchain 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 blockchain because it’s an immutable ledger.
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 blockchain, 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 blockchain 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 blockchain will change the way we pay each other, then it follows that in the future many many jobs will be paid through blockchain 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.
So should I start thinking about deleting my LinkedIn account?
We’re really excited about building a platform where the users own their data. If you’re signed up for LinkedIn and your resume is on there, LinkedIn has all this data about you that they sell to recruiters, and make $32 a year per user doing so. To me, that’s just parasitic! Gitcoin has a product called Kudos, which is a non-fungible token that you can send to someone to endorse them for a specific skill. There’s 300 kudos on the marketplace, and you can use each of them to attest to someone’s reputation. A key attribute of Web3 reputation is that you own your identity. I think it’s really exciting to build a 21st century digital resume and identity that users own, that Facebook and LinkedIn don’t own.
Gitcoin sits at the nexus of blockchain and open source — how do you see those communities coming together?
The blockchain space is very, very exciting for open source. For the first time ever, there’s actually funding available for open source software. For decades, we’ve had a hard time with developers creating a ton of value in open source, but not being able to capture that value. Now that we have programmable money, if we value open source, we can program our values into that money and developers can capture that value. There’s a $200 million worth of crypto market cap that is chasing too few developers. All of the money that used to go to some back office on wall street is now going to fund open source devs. I think that blockchain has a lot of promising attributes for open source, and for that reason we’re gonna see the macro open source and blockchain communities collide.
Your status report has both a sense of humor and transparency. The ‘Joe Dominance Index’ is great…
I’m super proud that the Joe Dominance Index (a measure of how many bounties on Gitcoin are funded by Joe Lubin, our primary financial backer) has come down from 95% when we first joined ConsenSys to 15% where it is today. When I first started pitching Gitcoin to VCs they told me: “Double sided markets are really hard to build, and even if you build it, we’re not convinced that you won’t burn all our capital by putting bounties up.” Ever since then, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder, and I’m glad to say they were wrong.
So how can Web developers get into the world of blockchain and Ethereum?
I think that you should just roll up your sleeves and dig in. It’s a super cliche piece of advice, but that’s how I learned. I dug in by buying a book on Solidity. I pulled down OpenZeppelin, and started playing with ERC-20 and ERC-721 smart contracts as a means of learning. I started showing up to hackathons. I’m someone who learns by doing and by practice. I think the amazing thing about the open source ecosystem is that you can access tens of millions of man hours of intellectual property all online for free.
It’s incredible when you think about it — it didn’t have to turn out this way. I’m 35, and I hang out with all these 24 year olds in the blockchain space who weren’t around in the 1990s when Microsoft dominated. Closed source could have won, but open source won. I think it’s incredible that we have this vast intellectual knowledge that’s available in open source software. You can go from 0 to 100 really quickly. I encourage people to take advantage of that commonwealth.
Colorado has been making waves both in terms of blockchain legislation and tech. What’s it like out there?
Colorado has a frontier, entrepreneurial spirit. It’s also got a liberatrian spirit, which depending on whether or not you’re in the Bitcoin community, will be attractive. It’s really amazing that there’s a good technology scene here, and that includes blockchain. We’ve got the Ethereum Denver meetup, the Boulder Blockchain meetup, of which I am a co-organizer, and the Ethereum Boulder meetup. We’re also seeing a macro trend of people moving from the coasts — from California and New York — to Colorado for quality of life reasons.
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Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
