History & Story

2022: You don’t crack collaboration by being onchain

After exiting our growth agency with Paco (Germinal), we have decided to build in the web3 space. At this stage, there is something we are passionate about: collaboration. We want to create a decentralized world of work, by using the superpowers of DAOs (”group chats with bank account”). We are sure the future of the collaboration is on-chain.

Transparency brings accountability. Instant money transfer brings distribution of the value created. Decentralization brings censorship resistanc

After launching three products, we learned the hard way that blockchain technology isn’t solving everything. In retrospect, this conclusion was inevitable, but in the euphoria of the moment, it wasn’t so obvious.

DAO tooling? No

Bounty platform on Ethereum? No

Bounty platform on Starknet? No

Waiting for our transactions, we have begun to contribute to open source in the Starknet ecosystem.

Collaboration at scale was happening for real in this world. But everything was broken.

We have decided to find the biggest problem of the OSS ecosystem. It was money allocation.

After launching a few prototypes (not onchain, you guess well), we were ready for the big launch.

2023: Lack of funding is not the real issue of open-source collaboration

Metrics January 2023:

15 active projects
105 registered devs
41 active devs

1st January, the launch of the product. We have successfully organized a few big community events, and a first big conference. The community begins to use the product, and gives us a lot of feedback. We are allocating more and more grants during our events. Yalaaaa. But it’s not scaling. The contributors connect to the platform for the unique purpose of withdrawing their money. They can’t do anything else.

Maintainers have more possibilities, but let’s be honest, there is no value for them if they don’t have a grant to allocate.

We contact a lot of ecosystems to sell them the possibility of using the platform to allocate grants. Over time, it begins to be obvious: grant allocation is just a feature.

A way for some projects to reward, in some cases, contributors. We need to think bigger.

We decided that our focus on grant strategy wasn’t enough, and we raised money on the thesis of becoming the place for OSS contribution with fabric.vc But our velocity is decreasing rapidly, so we decided to focus on it.

A grand vision can’t be achieved without a great product.

2024: AI can kill the open-source collaboration

Metrics January 2024

116 active contributors
31 active projects
1700 devs registered

We launched the first version of our OSS online event (now The Wave) in less than one week. One year later, we had 400 contributors merging a PR, compared to 28 in the first edition.

When you do something great with consistency, it compounds over time.

Matching devs to work together has a real value.

And the most important is yet to come. Working in the blockchain world helped us to understand something fundamental in our business. 2 things are very different in this industry, and they allow us to see the future

→ By default, everything is open-source

→ There is a direct potential upside to the open-source contribution

So we have seen, in first hands, people trying to game the system.

We have seen them using AI, the so-called “ChatGPT devs,” spamming maintainers in the hope of an airdrop or a financial reward. Know that this trend is everywhere. But we have seen it first, and it gives us an unfair advantage.

At the beginning of the year, contributor were only able to withdraw their rewards with a KYC process. Now, they can apply to issues and discover projects. Maintainers can manage their contributors. The product is beginning to evolve in the right direction.

It’s not enough.