Sometimes bounties are not enough to keep developers motivated. Scott Moore, Developer Relations Lead at Gitcoin, talks to ETHPlanet and tries to explain what are Gitcoin’s keys to success. Plus, the latest round of Gitcoin Grants…
Gitcoin was founded in 2017. Almost three years after launch, Gitcoin now has grown to a community of 40,000 developers — “a significant number of Ethereum developers are on the platform,” says Scott Moore, Developer Relations Lead at Gitcoin. And Gitcoin Grants — an early adopter of quadratic funding, has helped give over $2 million to web3 projects from around the world.
With these facts in mind, we wanted to know more about Gitcoin, the team behind the project, and what it has in store for their community.
Our favorite moments:
- How has Gitcoin grown from an open-source project to the leader that pushes the ecosystem forward
- Scott’s interesting takes on what makes you wake up in the morning and decide to build and launch projects on Gitcoin
- How Gitcoin got their first 100 users
- What’s Gitcoin Grants Round 6 and why should people participate
Without further ado here is the interview with Scott — enjoy!
1. Please tell us about yourself, what’s your background, and how did you get into the blockchain industry?
I was actually, like a surprising number of people in the blockchain industry, working in finance before I found out about Ethereum. I started off building machine learning models for a small lender, then eventually found myself at a private equity firm where I was quickly disenchanted by the way that the whole industry operated.
It was around that time in 2015 that I stumbled across Ethereum, and although I’d come across Bitcoin before the idea of actually being able to build more complex logic into a new financial system seemed really appealing. In many ways, I was lucky, because the frontier meetup was happening at that time in Toronto and so I jumped in to see what was happening and I’ve been hooked ever since. Funny enough hack.ether.camp, the first online hackathon I’d ever been part of, occurred a little while after that meetup and was actually my first real introduction to building on Ethereum. So in some ways, I’ve come full circle since much of our work at Gitcoin now is around growing the ecosystem with online hackathons as well.
2. For someone that knows nothing about Gitcoin, could you describe what is Gitcoin — a community, a crowdfunding platform, or a Github alternative with funding? And what’s Gitcoin Grants?
Gitcoin is really all about building remote-first, open-source developer communities. Bounties, online hackathons, and grants are certainly helpful individually on that front but we view Gitcoin as more than that. If you’re a web3 project, you want to find ways to tell people about what you’re working on, why it matters, how to get involved, and how to progress as a member of your ecosystem. If you’re a developer, you want to find projects that are interesting to you and align with your values. Our platform really makes this easy and we’ve doubled down on social features to make our own community of 40,000 developers feel welcome, valuable, and connected.
Now, all that said, lately we’ve definitely focused much of our effort on hackathons and grants. Hackathons provide a really low lift way for someone to check out and start building on a variety of projects, so they’re good starting points for someone new to the ecosystem or looking for a change of pace. To date, we’ve run over 20 events and distributed nearly $400,000 in prizes to teams from around the world.
Grants on the other hand are really for folks that have proven themselves to the community and who in turn the community wants to support. With generous support from the Ethereum Foundation, Gitcoin Grants has helped give over $2mm to ecosystem projects. But not all of this is our money — Gitcoin Grants uses a novel form of public goods funding called “quadratic funding”, which aims to give everyone in the ecosystem a say in how a pool of “matching funds” is distributed. This makes grants funding a collective activity and a rallying point for the community. To learn more about how this model works I highly recommend Vitalik’s article here. If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re up to lately, his latest review of our fifth funding round here is a great starting point.
3. How big is the team that works on Gitcoin? Why did you guys decide to build it and what were your expectations when you started?
Gitcoin is around 12 people now and growing! In fact, many of our team members started as part of the Gitcoin community and proved themselves through the platform itself — we’re proud to say we’re dogfooding our own technology.
In terms of vision, I have to give Kevin Owocki all of the credit there. Ultimately he saw the need for a better way to build open source communities, and throughout his experience as an engineering lead at a variety of successful web2 startups he found that the existing solutions for engaging developers were lacking. I decided to join early on because I saw that Kevin was right and that he was the kind of person who ships and iterates quickly.
That latter point is really key to Gitcoin’s success — many projects, both in web3 and beyond, let perfect be the enemy of good and it really hurts their ability to get the user feedback they need to make a great product.
4. What makes developers wake up in the morning and decide “I want to build something new and launch on Gitcoin?” And what can devs do on Gitcoin today?
It’s counter-intuitive but we try not to be opinionated about how developers should motivate themselves, while people often think that bounties and hackathon prizes are extrinsic motivators (meaning people come for the money), it’s usually the other way around: people are already intrinsically motivated but don’t have the time to spend on open source projects alongside their day jobs. Bounties and hackathons give talented developers the choice to play around with technology they care about since they know they’ll be able to earn some funds to sustain themselves.
Given how new web3 technology is, a lot of people really see an opportunity to fundamentally change how the world works today, whether that’s through DeFi, DAOs, or other new decentralized tools. We try to give developers access to all of these kinds of projects by working with our over 300 active funders on the platform. If a developer is looking for something in particular, the easiest thing to do is to search for the projects you’re interested in on our bounty explorer or join one of our upcoming hackathons.
5. What’re you working on now that the community has asked? What’s Gitcoin Round 6 and why should people participate?
We’ve got a lot of great feedback from the community, largely around how we can build a more social, fluid experience which is something that has been a high priority over the last 6 months. We try to take in as much feedback as we can and encourage anyone interested to open an issue on our GitHub repository.
Not only does Gitcoin support open source, but we’re also open source as well.
For Round 6, our sixth iteration of our quadratic funding rounds, our focus has been on simplifying the UX (for example, allowing bulk funding of grants) and making users feel like recurring payments matter to ensure successful projects can plan further into the future (this was something Vitalik really emphasized above). Aside from that we really just want to find more ways to engage the ecosystem and we’d love to have all of you involved in the round, even if you can only contribute 2 DAI to a couple of projects you care about.
6. How’re you thinking about the next versions — any new features / plans that you will be releasing?
In addition to what I mentioned above, I think we want to make it easier for people to work in teams, whether that’s groups of developers autonomously organizing, or a central team bringing more people on to help out. Most of these changes will be simple, but I think overall add a lot to the experience of working together remotely. We’ll keep you posted as this comes together!
7. Growth strategy is a must-have for companies of any size and scale. What’s your growth-tactic? How did you get the first 100 developers to sign up and launch projects?
It sounds silly to say but we really just started simple. The bounties product idea initially was just a way for a funder to post a task and a developer to request to work on it, and that idea really resonated with the Ethereum community which was in a period of skyrocketing growth around 2017. The first 100 users are always the hardest and we worked really closely with them to make sure we were meeting their needs and iterated accordingly.
The challenge now is actually much greater — depending on which reports you read the ecosystem has around 10,000 monthly developers or 200,000 “active developers”. By comparison, we have around 40,000 developers who’ve used Gitcoin over the last 6 months, meaning a significant number of Ethereum developers are on the platform. So as a result a lot of our focus has been on how we bring more developers into web3 more generally. We’ve made some great progress on this front that we’ll be sharing in the next few months, but suffice to say authentic participation in the broader open source community is a key part of this.
8. What needs to change for blockchain-based project to be more popular? And what would be the specific role Gitcoin play during the process?
Blockchain has a branding problem. In addition to the fact that it’s still very early technology when many people think of blockchain they think of scams, they think of poor UX, and they think of over-enthusiastic evangelists. Gitcoin’s role is as a bridge between web2 and web3 and part of that is dispelling these notions. We’re working hard to repair these bad first impressions (this is one of the major reasons UX has become such a priority for us), and our community is working hard too: the people that build cool and engaging products, that find solutions to UX, scaling, or other issues where there were none before, that talk in measured terms about the value web3 can bring — these people are the heroes of web3 and we want to help more of them thrive.
9. ETH 2.0 is just a few months away, in your opinion, will it level up your future work and eventually onboard more developers to the blockchain world and build products on Ethereum?
I think all of the teams working on ETH 2.0 have done an amazing job in the face of a lot of challenges, and I think their work is extremely important. That said, ETH 2.0 is really just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to onboarding more developers and increasing adoption. To do that, and to really succeed in the long-run, I think we also have to address the problems above in addition to finding ways for more members of the ecosystem to generate long-term sustainable business models for their companies (whether those models include tokens or not).
10. The last one, which blockchain-based products are you currently obsessed with, and why?
There are many I could name in the DeFi space and in the blockchain ecosystem more broadly. Plenty of these come up in Evan’s newsletter but right now the two that come to mind specifically, as someone who cares a lot about how to get creators paid are Our Zora and Foundation. These two projects are providing novel ways for artists in the real world to get paid without requiring them to really understand the nuts and bolts of blockchain. I think these are great examples of where we should be heading as an ecosystem. I’ll give another shoutout to Magic (the rebrand of Fortmatic) which is providing seamless login options to move us beyond MetaMask.
We always have a lot going on, our latest round of grants matching is starting Monday, June 15th, and so is our latest hackathon focused on privacy. We’d love to have anyone reading this involved in those events. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on WeChat (WeChat ID: ceresstation).
Gitcoin is definitely a new “twist” as well as a new opportunity for both the open source and blockchain world. And we believe that you (not just blockchain projects but also tech startups in general) can succeed when you adapt and embody Gitcoin’s key to success.
We thank Scott for sparing the time to share his thoughts with us about Gitcoin, and we hope that you, our community, enjoyed it as well. If you did, please let us know, and feel free to suggest any projects or people that you want us to interview or review in the future.
If you’re interested in exploring the potential of Ethereum blockchain and open source technology, ETHPlanet is a place of inspiration, tools, information, and the community you can trust.
► Visit our website here: 🌍 ETHPlanet.org 🌍
—
Chat with us here:
🐦 Twitter | 💬 Facebook | 💌 Email |💰 Gitcoin Grants
