Thanks for sharing @kdenhartog !
I think this point is especially salient:
“As a project grows and is utilized by more and more developers it will create an economic incentive for people and companies who wish to steer a project to buy up the currently available tokens or contribute to the project in order to collect these tokens.”
From the perspective of developers, the existence of something like Radicle means there can be tremendous upside in contributing to FOSS (free and open source software), assuming the FOSS they contribute to garners widespread adoption.
For users of a given open source project (read: the corps and individuals you mentioned), something of a zero-sum game comes into play. They can buy into the given governance token, thereby gaining influence, or they can refuse to buy into it and lose out on prioritising their feedback and requests for features. There isn’t much middle ground; you either buy in and benefit or you don’t.
For web3 native orgs — where cooperation is more the norm — buying into such a system will likely come easily.
For web2 corps, this may have 2 interesting implications. Firstly, it acts as a forcing function to bring web2 companies into web3 protocols. In order to steer the work in FOSS Orgs that adopt tokens, they will need to buy tokens. Secondly, it will put them in competition for influence. I imagine web2 corps will either spend indiscriminately to gain influence, thus driving up governance token prices, or (fingers crossed) they will change some of their business practices to become less centralized/siloed and more decentralized/cooperative.
The tooling Radicle will provide will allow FOSS orgs to structure the economics of their projects in many ways. It should be very interesting to see how each Org finds that balance of equilibrium between their labour/wages and their users. The examples above mostly assume FOSS Orgs using a limited supply of tokens, but there’s no reason they could create tokens with no upper limit on token supply.
I’m assuming you’ve read the post below, but if not, you may like it:
(You might also like to checkout the #drips channel on the Radicle Discord)
Especially in cases where the token supply for a project is limited, I can very easily envision there being a race to have ownership to steer some FOSS. The main worry I have here, though, is this creates speculation. This often means inactive token holders (read: people who don’t actually participate in governance). It also opens up the opportunity for corps to come in and buy up a lot of tokens, which is a hotly debated topic these days…
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1473139010197508098
I don’t actually agree that this is the case (yet), but I do think it’s worth raising as a downside of speculative behavior, whether it’s speculation on the price of a token or speculation on the power a token may wield in the future. I would be a bit worried if we just have a bunch of web2 corps owning 10% of most protocols out there, because that 10% can slowly turn into 15%, then 30%, and so on (don’t forget their proclivity to grow their assets over time).
In any case, my outlook is fairly bullish. The ideas in your blog post resonated with me. The ideas I’ve shared above are also some of what came to mind when I first started supporting Radicle. I just don’t see any long-term incentives for FOSS developers to continue doing things the old way.
I especially liked your point about existing FOSS projects – and not just web3 projects – adopting this model of funding. I think this topic is worth expanding upon because there is an incredible amount of value in existing FOSS that just isn’t funded properly yet and could likely benefit from adopting crypto-based funding.