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The Blockchain Research Institute will do a "Question for Regional Research Experts" every half month (2 weeks), inviting some prestigious, insightful and thinking experts in the industry to share and communicate with blockchain learners. Guests often bring insights and fresh and nutritious insights, which can be called "half-month talk in the blockchain field". In this issue of the program "Ask from the Regional Research Experts", Gitcoin co-founder Scott Moore was invited.
Gitcoin: A decentralized application built on the Ethereum network. Although Gitcoin has "coin" in its name, it does not issue tokens. Gitcoin provides a community for developers to collaborate through bounties in open source projects and monetize their skills.
Gitcoin was born in the thriving tech community in Boulder, Colorado. One of the most amazing places in the Boulder community is the #givefirst mantra. The founding team established its own business based on the advice, guidance and relationships of the local technology community.
Gitcoin is a project that combines the #givefirst slogan with cryptocurrency incentives to create excellent software. By allowing Repo maintainers, developers, and funders to find each other, open source software collaboration through the Gitcoin platform.
Activity started
District Research Question 1: At present, Scott's gitcoin is working on dapp incentives. Can you introduce the general idea of gitcoin?
Of course, Gitcoin is trying to incentivize the open source developer community based on remote development (through bounties, hackathons, grants, etc.). We are currently built on Ethereum and are exploring integration with other platforms. In short, we are a two-way market, anyone in the world can pay ETH or ERC20 tokens to "reward" a task.
We use direct integration with GitHub and other services, making it easy to reference work that a single maintainer or team has assigned.
The development of our project is largely due to the web2 developer adoption and retention program (called the "tribe"). We now have more than 25,000 developers on the platform and are helping to develop more than 500 web3 ecosystems.
Interestingly, despite the name Gitcoin, we currently don't actually have a coin. On the contrary, we hope that any community that owns tokens or tokens will eventually be able to use their tokens on the platform so that they can provide it to more users and developers, who will become its ecosystem for a long time. Part of the system.
In addition to allowing people to complete individual tasks through bounties, we also hold a wider range of hackathons, where anyone can participate and build on other blockchain projects ()
Finally, anyone can provide grants to their community programs or projects on gitcoin.co/grants, and based on the support released by the crowdfunding, we will use the model designed by Vitalik Buterin to allocate funds. The overview is as follows:
So far, we have distributed nearly $5 million in funding to developers worldwide.
District Research Question 2: Could you please introduce what dapp development is first, Scott, and what are the similarities and differences between dapp development and app development?
of course can!
First of all, dapp development is short for decentralized application development.
Of course, "what is decentralization" is a good starting point, but it is also tricky.
Decentralization is actually the distribution of information flow and function flow in a given application, which can be done in multiple parts of the technology stack and the incentive mechanism (and governance) used by the application.
The image may have been used many times, but I think it is very intuitive to help compare the centralized model with the decentralized model or the distributed model:
Therefore, from this perspective, a way to characterize decentralization may be "single point without decision-making" or "single point without failure"
But there are multiple nodes that can replace these decisions, and in some cases a cluster approach like Ethereum will be adopted.
Ethereum is particularly interesting because, unlike Bitcoin, it can build logic into "smart contracts" managed on the chain. No one has the right to manage these contracts except those specified by the contract.
So, for example, we might build a front end that can access a series of smart contracts in order to say, run a community group and collect votes (in the form of DAO) or do more complex things such as creating a series of checks and balances with DAI and MakerDAO Similarly, it can ensure that "stable coins" maintain a certain value.
If you want to view a large number of dapps, I recommend going to resources like to check out some of the latest models that people are talking about.
I am also happy to answer any specific questions about how to build on Ethereum or other chains, and I recommend learning Austin Griffith's tutorial to gain insight into the behind-the-scenes knowledge of how to build DApps.
The last thing I want to point out here is that dapps require a "hardware" approach to application design in multiple ways.
Once the smart contract is deployed, it may be difficult to change it. In some cases, it is not as simple as pushing code updates because it is on-chain. One of the tradeoffs of decentralization is that any code placed on the chain is not under the control of anyone else, and it is not completely under your control.
Therefore, proper auditing of smart contracts in such as Solidity (the language of choice in the case of Ethereum) is essential.
District Research Question 3: After Scott's introduction, I believe that all of you have a better understanding of dapps. At present, Scott is also engaged in the related fields of dapp incentives. For dapps, what are the current forms of the contribution reward mechanism? How's the effect?
I think incentives are very interesting. Some dapps have their own tokens to incentivize development, while some dapps like ours just use existing tokens to power their services.
Tokens are usually external and clearly motivated, which means that people are motivated by acquiring items.
In addition, dapps can also be customized based on intrinsic motivation or self-made motivation.
We believe both of these are essential for building sustainable projects and ecosystems.
However, as far as the token model is concerned, there are many types, and some are more effective than others.
Probably the most ineffective are simple "currency" type tokens. If I build a dapp on Ethereum and create my own token for use on the platform for trading in this environment, the potential incentives or mechanisms are largely the same as the token I just used ETH or the first-layer chain .
But tokens have more interesting uses, such as MKR used to control the manufacturer's process of managing DAI (its stablecoin).
Therefore, generally speaking, the governance of tokens is an exciting thing for those who have mortgage needs.
I personally like Livepeer's method:
This model is mainly used for peer-to-peer video, where transcoders pay for their services.
Token holders can “hold” or “deposit and lock the tokens into a smart contract” so that others can perform this work on their behalf. In exchange, they get newly minted tokens every day, which means supply The model will be diluted over time (which is inflationary), so if you don't use tokens, they will depreciate.
Disclaimer: I don't have any Livepeer right now, and I don't necessarily know if this is a good investment, but in theory, this is an interesting model.
Of course, there are also tokens that map to basic assets, and some tokens only represent gold or other physical assets.
Then of course there are tokens in the "first layer" context. For example, ETH is similar to the delegated tokens in the Livepeer case. The purpose of these tokens is to protect the network.
There are many things that can explain in depth how it works in practice. At the same time, the proof of equity in ETH2 is different from Bitcoin-style proof of work.
I recommend reading this article to get more details on how this system works and how to be protected: @chromatcapital/eth2-for-dummies- 11ff9b11509f
District Research Question 4: For project parties, if a team is needed to develop dapp, what should they do or what should they prepare to participate in the incentive-based dapp development network?
I think a starting point is to choose a platform that can build a foundation. Ethereum is of course the most popular (the best choice for learning Ethereum), but there are many other similar things.
As mentioned earlier, the key is to be extra careful when planning the architecture first, because it may be more difficult to upgrade on the dapp.
Now, it is becoming more and more common to start from a relatively centralized application, maybe it does not even have a built-in token, and then gradually decentralize power or provide power to the community through token or other tools.
Many DAOs start from this aspect.
We can start voting in a simple form through the community (in the early days on MakerDAO it was just people chatting on the community phone).
Then, once the ideas and the network have real value, and the initial version of the dapp is deployed, the project starts to use tokens more for governance.
However, once there is a project, or a token, there are many ways to motivate more developers to work on the project.
Gitcoin is certainly a way, you can use any token supported by the platform to do this. Another way is to launch instances such as specifically for your community. This allows you to create tokens to provide users with funds based on decentralized operations. If someone is interested in a great blog post, makes a great request on the codebase or helps make a community call, you can reward them with these tokens in a way that you think their contribution is worthwhile.
In general, these tools cannot be used to replace people who are really excited about your project. For this, you need to really explain why you want to build your own things for people, and they need to see the value in them based on their own strengths.
District Research Question 5: For developers, what convenience can the use of dapp incentive network bring to developers, can you give some examples, and can you provide some suggestions for developers who have not been exposed to this form?
Of course, in my opinion, hackathons are a good way to start using these networks, because as a hacker and sponsor, you know the timeline for submitting/receiving submissions
(I would be happy to talk to anyone who wants to start in this area.)
Generally, if you are a developer who wants to use this kind of network, the key factor to consider is how big your team is / how far the project is going
I suggest that smaller teams do internal work first to obtain MVP, and then reach out to the wider community.
District Research Question 6: We can see that the dapp market is still in a niche market. Then, in what way will a form of community incentive like gitcoin promote the growth of dapp?
This is a very critical issue, and currently only 20,000 to 200,000 developers use cryptocurrency. It is still a small industry, and there is still a lot of room for growth.
The easiest way to grow is to let more people understand the meaning of building dapps, and these people will naturally understand how to use other dapps and the value of using them.
Therefore, we are very focused on increasing the number of developers. We hope that more than one million developers will build on Ethereum and other platforms in the next few years.
We need to make sure that people have the idea of starting and entering the ecosystem, and that they can use the revenue-generating tokens to interact with new projects and tools, which is crucial.
District Research Question 7: I heard that Scott's team also contributed to the prevention and control of the new crown epidemic. Can you introduce it to us?
Of course, we recently used Vitalik's "quadratic funding" model and provided relief of $150,000 in this regard.
Many of us are working at the grassroots level and distributing masks and ventilators to hospitals around the world. These people are already part of Ethereum and other communities.
As part of this, we also have some larger non-profit organizations, such as Save the Children.
Vitalik wrote a nice summary post and some thoughts in this rescue (this is part of the larger Ethereum community funding round):
As part of the consensus activity, we are currently also conducting additional fundraising activities with Coindesk.
It is still here, and will continue until mid-June: https://
Ultimately, our secondary financing tool aims to provide funding for public goods, items that everyone can use and use.
We believe that responding to the covid-19 pandemic is a public interest, and believe that others should do the same.
The goal of "quadratic funding" is to ensure that the ideas of each donor can be matched. For example, if project A has 2 people each giving $4, the matching amount is $16.
However, if 8 people each gave $1, the matching amount is $64
In both cases, a total of $8 was donated, but in one case, more people expressed support for the project.
We use some sybil resistance mechanisms to avoid overloading the system.
Community question
Zhousd: What are the advantages of Ethereum over other platforms?
Ethereum is currently the most attractive to developers. About 80% of developers engaged in blockchain development have used or are currently using Ethereum.
This makes it possible to build a very powerful project ecosystem, these projects can work well together.
However, I do think that other public or consortium chains may also become part of the ecosystem. For example, Gitcoin is increasingly supporting new blockchains, and we currently support ETC, Celo, and Zilliqa.
Considering users, we do not recommend using blockchains with a small user base.
In other words, due to the availability of resources, I will definitely recommend Ethereum to Ethereum newbies immediately.
Zhousd: Thank you. What do you think of the development of blockchain 3.0?
I think new projects like NEAR are very interesting, and I like the idea behind them. I am not sure if they are ready, I think it will take a year or two for them to be widely used. It is difficult to say whether another project will eventually surpass Ethereum, but it has already achieved a substantial lead.
Yeahh: Scott, how do you evaluate the work done by developers in order to provide them with proportional rewards
So we don't actually evaluate it, it's very important
Maintainers publish bounties based on their existing GitHub or other repository issues
The maintenance personnel decide whether the work meets the specifications
If a dispute arises for some reason, we are currently dealing with this issue socially in public forums, so if the developer has clearly completed the specified work but the maintainer does not accept it, people will stop working with them
We have a reputation score, which can be used by users who have interacted with both developers and funders, so it's easy to see
Fortunately, we have not seen many such disputes so far
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