Investing in OnlyDust — Pushing the Contribution Economy
Fabric Ventures is leading OnlyDust’s €3m seed round alongside Frst, Ergodic (LambdaClass) and Stake Capital.
One of the very original theses when we launched Fabric Ventures 6–7 years ago was that we were entering into the 4th and golden age of open source software development. An age where we move on from tech giants building their moats based on open source software they co-opted and data they didn’t own.
“The permissionless innovation on open platforms and ‘trustless’ peer to peer networks combined with token-driven incentive and governance systems has started a Cambrian explosion of developers and ecosystems uniting around open source projects. We believe that the open source development movement has finally found its elusive ‘business model’ — a model which doesn’t necessarily reward a single central entity, but instead fairly incentivises all contributors and participants, creating a distributed digital economy within each network.”
Today open source software development continues playing a critical role for Web3 but also for tech more broadly, and yet the process has not been streamlined nor properly incentivised. It takes days to find an open repository that accepts contributions, and weeks to get feedback on a pull request. In order to have a chance to get paid, contributors must spend days writing a proposal and waiting for up to 3 months for a grant / sponsorship.
Most protocols, companies and projects have a desire to find open source contributors and have a budget allocated to it, but they do not have the right routes to finding these contributors, nor to properly incentivising them in a way that grants upside in their long term success and in a way that rewards value added / impact of contribution. Traditional grants or bounty programs mostly attract mercenaries that do one-off contributions and don’t have long term alignment.
That is until we came across the team at OnlyDust thanks to an introduction from Pierre at Frst — a team that multiple of our portfolio founders have been raving about:
“when we started, the first thought I had was « we need to be featured on OD for contributions » — It was a pure no brainer. We are managing payments via PRs on OnlyDust, it’s super convenient”
“Gregoire is probably the single most focused founder I’ve met, it’s mind boggling. Their strongest point is their pragmatism and speed: they iterate & fail super fast”
OnlyDust is a platform that streamlines, organises and incentivises open source software development. It acts as a social network for open-source contributors so that every developer can find projects suitable for their expertise, contribute effectively without wasting time and receive incentives for their contributions.
OnlyDust has become the largest coordinator of open source developers in the Web3 ecosystem, supporting 500 developers from 17 countries working on ZK rollups, privacy, decentralised finance and beyond. Over 15 protocols & companies — including the likes of Starkware, the Starknet Foundation, the OP Foundation, Nethermind, Aptos, Zama and the Ethereum Foundation — are using OnlyDust to coordinate cash and token incentives to these contributors to the tune of $700,000 a month — over a 10x growth since January this year!
We are thrilled to announce that we are leading their €3m round to accelerate the coordination of open source contributions across Web3 and beyond! We are joined in this round by our friends at Frst, Ergodic Capital (LambdaClass) and Stake Capital amongst others.
Fabric is a venture contributor: building, backing and accelerating the boldest ideas in Web3, to create a more open and fair economy. As a top European Web3 fund, Fabric focuses on being the “first institutional cheque” invested in companies, crypto assets and digital networks on a path to be global winners.
The Fabric team is made of founders and operators who have built companies to over $3 billion in value, and holds operational and investing experience from Google, PayPal, Sun Microsystems, Visa, Accel, Headline, and EQT. Fabric Ventures’ portfolio includes Sorare, NEAR Protocol, Immutable, Sky Mavis, Nansen, Consensys, Messari, Polkadot, Ledger, Ramp, YGG, Argent, 1inch, and The Graph.
For more information on Fabric’s portfolio, opportunities and our investment thesis please visit our website and follow us on Twitter & LinkedIn
