GitPOAP has raised a $4.2M Seed round to memorialize professional contributions and accomplishments as blockchain-based badges
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We are excited to announce that GitPOAP has recently closed a $4.2M seed round led by Inflection.xyz & Libertus Capital, with participation from POAP, Protocol Labs, Avalanche VC, and a number of knowledgeable angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Patricio Worthalter, Anthony Sassano, Superphiz, Mariano Conti, and others. We plan to use the money to grow our team, onboard more projects, and build deeper integrations to bring value and utility to the GitPOAP ecosystem. Our goal is to become the go-to place for memorializing professional contributions and accomplishments.
GitPOAP is dedicated to bringing your professional reputation on chain. We’re doing this by building a platform that enables Web 2.0 and web3 software projects and organizations to issue blockchain-based badges for meaningful contributions on GitHub.
We’re issuing these badges as POAPs — NFTs that represent an action that you’ve taken. Your POAP collection already says a lot about who you are, and we’re deepening that by adding your contributions & accomplishments. POAPs not only serve as mementos of things you’ve done, but are also a gateway to a vibrant ecosystem of social and professional applications that you can participate in with on-chain reputation.
GitPOAP is now memorializing contributions to 617 repositories at the center of the Ethereum ecosystem including the Ethereum protocol & client teams, developer infrastructure & tooling (e.g., Solidity, OpenZeppelin, HardHat, web3,js, ethers.js, web3.py), and many other foundational projects (e.g., Yearn, Ledger, Gitcoin, Gnosis Safe & Chain, Rotki). We also awarded GitPOAPs to hackathon participants at the MIT Bitcoin Expo and the Staking Gathering hosted by EthStaker at Devconnect.
Today, we’re announcing that GitPOAP has increased capability and is ready for any open source project to use. Join us and begin onboarding here!
We’re already seeing an impact
Users of GitPOAP are already experiencing value. “We’ve seen an increase in the number of meaningful contributions to Hardhat since issuing GitPOAPs,” says Patricio Palladino of the Nomic Foundation.
Skylar Weaver, a member of the Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon team, also reports that “contribution based POAPs were very helpful in identifying active builders in the community, which are exactly the folks we want at Devcon.”
For maintainers:
- More contributors: many projects have reported an increase in valuable contributions after awarding GitPOAPs
- Coordination tooling: GitPOAPs can be utilized for access control, voting systems, raffles, and more
- Project funding: we aim to make it easier to bootstrap & sustain open source development by channeling funds directly to contributors
For contributors:
- Self-sovereign resume: you now have a new way to collect and showcase your contributions and accomplishments to supplement your profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, etc
- Discounted tickets to Devcon VI: POAPs that represent software contributions recently boosted your application to get a builder-discount ticket to Devcon VI
- Airdrops: open source developers deserve more rewards and recognition, don’t you think? Lens.xyz profiles are a fun start, and there’s more to come
For the ecosystem:
- Better ways to find collaborators: Tools like Mazury can be used to search & filter through people based on their GitPOAPs
- Sybil resistance: GitPOAPs give you a sybil-score boost in Gitcoin Passport, which lays the groundwork for building stronger web3 applications
- Gated events: great things can happen when you get the right minds in the same place
The platform
GitPOAP enables software projects to issue POAPs based on contributions that happen on GitHub and gives contributors a way to showcase the contributions they’ve made. If you’ve contributed code to one of the projects we support, you’re able to mint your ‘annual contributor’ GitPOAPs on GitPOAP.io that forever serve as an attestation of the value you’ve added. You can configure your digital resume and coordinate with your collaborators with a suite of POAP-enabled tooling.
So, what’s new? And, what’s next?
We are excited to announce that GitPOAP is now ready to support any Web 2.0 or web3 open source project! Maintainers and contributors, connect your GitHub account and add your project to the onboarding queue here.
We also recognize that not all contributions come in the form of software. We’re launching tools to equip maintainers with the ability to reward all contributions to their projects, no matter what they are or what form they take.
From there, we plan to expand beyond open source software and become a unified platform for any project or organization to use. We’re building a one-stop shop to issue recognition badges for any professional contribution that’s valuable and verifiable. If you have a use-case for GitPOAPs beyond software, we’d love to hear from you, reach out to us here.
Why is this important?
We’re building GitPOAP to solve real-world challenges we’ve faced while bootstrapping and growing open source projects. web3 provides new modes of interaction and GitPOAP enables a novel way to reward contributors based on the value they add. We believe this model can be generalized beyond open source and also enable new paradigms of collaboration.
The future of web3 requires deeper and more nuanced personas & reputation. The on-chain representation of you is currently very limited, which puts a ceiling on how we can interact with one another & what applications we can build.
For example, many DAOs are relying on token holdings for their governance. Imagine if you could easily poll the people who are actually contributing to your project? Project funding is also inherently difficult — wouldn’t it be nice to have a unified & verified record of who has contributed, so you can channel the funds effectively?
Finding collaborators is another major challenge. People are multidimensional, and understanding whether someone will be a good collaborator requires going much deeper than a resume. We’re laying the foundation for a trusted, queryable record of contribution that can enable new and novel ways to find others to work with.
Building on GitPOAP
On-chain identities are only useful if there are others to interact with and applications built to leverage them. That’s why we decided to build on top of POAP.
GitPOAP is meant to be a platform that will enable a new era of web3 applications, and we’re excited to see what else people build on top of it. Our public API is now live! Start building and feel free to reach out if there’s anything we can do to better support you.
Thanks
Cheers to you for reading this far and being on this journey with us. We’re excited to build with you. You can follow along on our Twitter and please join our Discord to participate in the community.
