A Guide to the MyBit Decentralised Development Fund
And how you can get involved
Today we are taking an in-depth look at the MyBit Decentralised Development Fund, the DDF. It’s something many of you are excited about as we’ve received many questions regarding how it works and how people can get involved.
So first off, what is the DDF?
We announced the DDF in our October Announcement Blog, which lays out our vision for a groundbreaking tool that moves development away from the MyBit team and to the community. The DDF will reward developers monetarily for any of the tasks they perform for the MyBit Network — becoming, in effect, the lifeblood of the whole project.
For a truly decentralised application, a handful of people must not be in control of the network. A single point of failure should not exist. Instead, control should be distributed to the network stakeholders. Therefore, if the core team can no longer contribute, the project will not fail because it is owned and managed by the community. If we take a look at Ethereum, we can see that while the founders play a significant role, the project could continue to grow without their input. We hope to follow their lead.
“The DDF will reward developers monetarily for any of the tasks they perform for the MyBit Network — becoming, in effect, the lifeblood of the whole project.”
Another great benefit of the DDF is scalability. Through the DDF, MyBit will be able to scale at a much faster rate, in a much more cost-effective way, allowing resources to be moved to where they’re most needed. After all, many hands make light work. Compare the increased development rate of 100 people working on a single task to the development rate of 10 people working on 10 tasks and you can see the scaling power of decentralised development. In this way, the DDF will enable us to rapidly increase the rate of growth of the MyBit Network.
Through the DDF we’ll also be able to harness the world’s best developers. Currently, it’s hard to find top tech talent because the best developers are already happily employed at some of the world’s top companies. Developers like these are always looking for side projects to stay up-to-date on new technologies and industries, but few want to suffer through a lengthy onboarding process for what amounts to a few hours of work per week. The DDF offers a way to monetise their contributions with the added benefit of no onboarding process; all they need is a GitHub account.
Lastly, the DDF also removes barriers. Many developers in emerging economies can’t work on projects because they’re restricted by geography and the availability of local opportunities. The DDF gives anyone with a laptop and internet access the ability to contribute to the project. This is a major success for economic inclusion and we hope more companies will follow in our footsteps.
So how does it work?
The DDF offers tasks for anyone to complete — from developers to designers and marketers — and rewards them for their contribution. Using the DDF is pretty simple, but it does require a basic understanding of GitHub.
If you’re unfamiliar with GitHub, it’s a platform that makes it easy to manage open source projects, especially projects where there are many different people contributing. It works through a system of ‘forking’, ‘committing changes’ and ‘pull requests’ — each of which we’ll explain in turn to get you familiar with how GitHub works.
- Forking is simply the process of copying a repository so you can make changes without adversely affecting the main application or content.
- Committing changes is exactly what it sounds like. It submits changes you have made and updates your fork.
- Pull requests are the process of asking for permission to merge your fork (which holds all of your updates (committed changes) with the main repository — think of it as submitting your work for approval to be added to the project.
Now you’re more familiar with GitHub, we’ll run through how the DDF works in practice:
1. To get started, simply find a task. You can see what tasks are available on https://ddf.mybit.io/. To take on a challenge you will need a GitHub account as well as an open bounty account (if you don’t already have one you can set one up here: https://openbounty.status.im).
2. Click ‘accept challenge’ and you’ll be taken to GitHub. If you are a developer, you should be familiar with this workflow. If you’re not, then this may be a learning experience. Don’t worry, though, it’s pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it.
3. Now click ‘fork’ in the upper right corner. This will fork the repository on GitHub, which means quite simply that you are copying the repository so you can make changes to it (without affecting the main application). Now you’re free to edit and add in your work. Remember to name your working file something like Task(#)_(your description). You can then add your file by clicking ‘upload files’ or you can create a new file; both options are located to the left of the green ‘clone or download’ button. Please note that when creating files you have to manually enter a name for that file.
4. To finish uploading your file, click ‘commit changes’. Committing changes simply means you are submitting your changes to update the repository code.
5. To complete your submission, click ‘new pull request’ in the top left. A pull request is a request to merge or update the code and repository content so your changes can be added to the main application. The ‘new pull request’ button will bring you to a screen where GitHub automatically checks to make sure what you are submitting is compatible with the existing code.
6. If everything checks out, you’ll be able to create a new pull request.
7. At this point, title your pull request (e.g. Fixes #(task number)) and click the green ‘create pull request’ button.
Great! Once a member of the MyBit team approves your pull request, you’ll automatically receive the value of the bounty to your linked wallet address. And that’s it!
What’s the future for the DDF?
Under the current release of the DDF, the MyBit team has full control over issuing new tasks and approving completed ones. It is our goal, by the end of 2019, to have the DDF fully controlled by the community. This involves anyone being able to propose a new task and open it up to a community vote as well as vote on accepting or rejecting completed tasks. This network governance will be a result of integrating voting functionality for holders of the MyBit token.
More information regarding this important network upgrade will be made available in the future blog post, “Decentralising & Automating MyBit.”
Get involved
You can search tasks and get started on a task at our dedicated DDF page. Currently, only our existing dApps — like MyBit Go — are eligible to receive rewards through the DDF, but this is just the start. We’re building a truly autonomous and decentralised organisation that powers a whole suite of revolutionary dApps.
To get started, visit our dedicated DDF page and if you have questions, feel free to ask us on our Telegram.
Until next time!
The MyBit Team.
