Hello everyone!
We’re Open-Source-Economy, a platform to enable open-source contributors to earn compensation while upholding the principles of decentralization, common good, and community-led governance.
Our project is part of CV Labs accelerator (batch 06) in Switzerland’s Crypto Valley. We’re exploring whether Polkadot is the right ecosystem for this project.
Potential Impact on Polkadot
Our platform targets 400 million web2 open-source developers globally. If successful, we aim to onboard a significant portion of this community, requiring a scalable blockchain that can handle extensive activity.
Notably, the open-source market was valued at $28 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $100 billion by 2030, highlighting the substantial growth and opportunity in this sector.
Problem we are solving
Open-source projects face a critical economic challenge: they lack a dedicated business model to rival proprietary software effectively. Projects are faced with a tough choice. They can either choose to adhere strictly to the principles of open source and free software, which often results in insufficient funding, limited resources, and ultimately a bad user experience or they can potentially compromise on these core values by adopting revenue-generating strategies, potentially jeopardizing their community support.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift toward the adoption of the commercial model, highly effective for generating revenue, with $28.3 billion generated in 2022 and projected to reach $100 billion by 2030. However, this model is facing backlash from the open-source community due to issues like unfair profit distribution among contributors, a lack of community control, a tendency to prioritize profits for a single corporate entity, and various scandals that have negatively impacted the community. This shift has gradually eroded the strength of the open-source community. Companies are now using open-source massively, while their contributors are losing hope.
Solution
We are the Robinhood + Fiverr of open-source projects. We are developing a decentralized marketplace that brings together three open-source stakeholders: users, contributors (individuals who code), and investors:
- Users pay contributors to resolve their issues–that’s the Fiverr part.
- Contributors receive funding while focusing on what matters most to them: advancing the project and staying true to open-source or free software principles.
- Investors speculate on the future value of the open-source project–that’s the Robinhood part.
In other words, we are creating an open-source business model that remains true to open-source principles while incorporating successful elements from non-open-source businesses.
How? By using blockchain technology and solid economic knowledge.
Our marketplace allows projects to issue their own token designed to meet the needs of all open-source stakeholders and is directly tied to the success of the project.
Team background
Founder - Lauriane Mollier.
I have a deep expertise in engineering and crypto-based finance. I have played integral roles in two successful startups : Snapbus (now integrated into DeutschBahn), serving as the first employee during the 0 to 1 phase, and architecting the entire financial system (web2 + web3) for Swissborg, bringing it from 0 to ~1M users.
I’ve donned various hats alongside my engineering role — handling initial client interviews, contributing to tokenomics, and serving as a product owner. Furthermore, I established a YouTube channel and was actively involved in political organizations at different levels, ranging from university to state.
ETH Zürich talk - project presentation
Questions for the Community
- Integration of Web2 Developers:
We aim to attract web2 developers skeptical about blockchain by implementing web3 seamlessly in the background, without affecting the frontend experience. We have not found an off-ramp solution in Polkadot. Would we need to develop this ourselves if we choose Polkadot?
- Technical Considerations:
Our team is familiar with Solana and Ethereum but not Polkadot. From what we understand, choosing Polkadot might necessitate building our own parachain to maintain a one-token per project system. Is this correct? Also, could anyone provide insights on the costs, pain points, security risks, and challenges in hiring engineers for developing a parachain, compared to using Solana or an Ethereum L2 solution?