Hey Radicle community! Scott here from Dev Protocol! We’re huge fans of Radicle and see it as the future home of all developers. A Dev Protocol and Radicle would create and capture value for the developers building OSS projects on Radicle and for the Radicle Treasury.
Collaboration Concept:
Direct Integration to allow Radicle users to tokenize their OSS project and start receiving inflationary funding via Dev Protocol.
Advantages for Radicle
Dev Protocol Treasury receives a 5% fee of each OSS token minted on the platform. We will share 50% of the fee with the Radicle Treasury. What’s an OSS token? Each project that joins Dev Protocol mints OSS tokens for their project. The holders of the OSS token receive the inflationary funding rewarded to the project. OSS tokens in the future could have exterior utility from Dev Protocol such as utility tokens or governance tokens for Web2 and Web3 OSS projects. This allows Radicle to receive DEV each second + capture future value or governance power of the OSS projects on their protocol.
Provide a sustainable funding stream for the projects on your protocol.
Integrate further within the DeFi ecosystem and open future use cases such as OSS utility, lending, meta-governance, and profit-sharing.
Radicle Treasury could potentially fund projects on Dev Protocol as a growth hack to get them onboarded on Radicle
Advantages for Dev Protocol
Grow alongside the future of OSS development
Gain a new supply channel for users
Join the Seeder’s Program
Create new opportunities within DeFi
What is Dev Protocol?
An altruistic yield farming protocol where Patrons and OSS projects can receive money for supporting each other.
Dev Protocol is a blockchain protocol that allows Open Source projects to sustainably fund their development. Patrons stake the DEV token for projects they want to fund. The protocol then mints new DEV tokens that are split between the OSS project and Patron. Dev Protocol is the only platform that allows both Patrons and OSS projects to earn money by supporting each other. The Protocol’s APY is based on DEV staked on the protocol and OSS projects onboarded. Each project onboarded increases the APY while the more DEV Patrons stake lowers the APY.
When an OSS project joins Dev Protocol a token is minted for their project. Creator rewards are sent to the OSS token holders. Project maintainers are encouraged to share this token, or the DEV rewards, with their project’s contributors.
That looks very exciting! We’re currently working on funding pools, where you can maintain a list of your receivers and a recurring budget, which regularly gets split between them. Dev Protocol looks like there’s only one huge pool, into which everybody put their donations and the community organically decides where they should go?
No, that’s not the case I’ll explain it further. There’s currently one sector, OSS, with the market being Github currently. Every project shares the same APY to incentivize Patrons to stake for projects they support rather than those with the highest yields. The APY is based off two factors:
total DEV staked on the protocol like ETH 2.0.
total OSS projects onboarded. Each OSS project onboarded adds a unit of inflation per block.
Patrons, DEV holders, decide individually where to stake their tokens. In the future we could expect to see users depositing with a DAO that then decides on which projects to stake for.
Could someone explain what staking, grant farming and commit farming on dev protocol does? Commit farming sounds like a scary incentive, but I might be misinformed.
One problem I see with tokenizing OSS projects is that the maintainers often change over time. So rather than having a token issuance approach where a large chunk is minted early in the lifecycle, what about a model where a constant reward for maintainers is ensured at any given time.
I think licence NFT-like assets funnelled through the Radicle app could be a way for projects to sustain without tokenizing the OSS projects themselves. There could be a 2021 NFT, 2022 NFT which supports the usage of a piece of software for each year to generate a sustainable funding stream. If we look at NFTs beyond a speculative object, they could be a great way to offer financial and emotional support with many variations. I also wonder what “trading” an OSS projects asset would do to the projects. There is just a lot of unknowns which is why I prefer a slow and thoughtful approach.
Patrons, DEV token holders, stake DEV on specific OSS projects that they want to support. Like yield farming the protocol then gives governance tokens to the OSS project and Patron based on the current APY. We call it grant farming because your yield farming grants for OSS projects.
Commit farming is a new way to earn OSS tokens if you’re a developer. Provide contributions to an OSS project with a commit farming program and you can start earning that project’s token that receives the funding from Dev Protocol.
If maintainers change over time then this is a necessary to have OSS tokens. Why? Because new contributors need incentive to take over your work if there’s no monetization model besides donations. A project that is earning $20,000 per month of DEV can attract a lot more talent.
We’re not advocating to trade OSS tokens, but this is a common use case some projects are showing interests in. To unlock utility or governance capabilities of OSS tokens then they’d have to be traded.
Staking allows for the project’s community or any holder of DEV to sustainably finance their favorite project through the surplus created by the inflationary characteristic of the token. Commit farming as I see is a way for reinforcing the incentive for the community to get involved and contribute to the project, if you’re a developer- just think that there are lot of developers that would love to contribute but they’re not able to because they have to work somewhere else, this allows them to take different decisions when allocating their time between working and contributing. It creates a new economy.
Well, having a token is a extremely powerful tool, as a way of incentivizing your contributors, attracting talented developers that otherwise wouldn’t be able to join the project, expanding and creating an incentive so that more people use the software, I can think of millions of different positive points about having a token and by far they surpass the negative points imo. As far as being tradable I think it’s a good idea, you want it to be as valuable as possible so that the core community, first-movers and contributors get the maximum financial reward for their work.
Yield farming in DeFi (e.g. Yearn) does something very specific in the background that accounts for the yields. That might be DEX arbitrage, arbitrage between lending/borrowing rates, liquidity provision while farming a governance token or similar. That results in some APY calculation for a vault or LP. How would the yields be calculated for an OSS project?
How is commit farming structured? Is it the amount of commits that matter or is the commit size taken into account as well? How are non-commit contributions to an ecosystem (e.g. organizing, people management, community work) taken into account?
And regarding staking: Is there any other mechanism that staking does, other than locking the token? Staking removes liquidity from the markets which may or may not be intended.
Hi, I am CTO of Dev Protocol. There are several reasons why the Dev Protocol does tokenization with ERC20 rather than ERC721 or similar specifications.
This models a corporation rather than ownership.
Tokenized Open Source include multiple stakeholders and multiple assets.
Multiple stakeholders (e.g, committers, investors, supporters) can each have a different share, and multiple stakeholders can receive inflationary funding in proportion to the share.
2021 NFT concept could be used to direct funding to these stakeholders.
Owners can use a balance management contract to handle frequent committer changes. For example, owner Alice can transfer 1% of tokens to committer Bob, and Alice can regain 1% three months later.
A single project often has multiple repositories. Therefore, the Dev Protocol allows multiple assets to be associated with a token. Owners have the freedom to do so and not.
All OSS projects on Dev Protocol have a standard APY to prevent users from supporting a project strictly because of its yield. The Protocol’s APY is based on DEV staked on the protocol and OSS projects onboarded. Each project onboarded increases the APY while the more DEV Patrons stake lowers the APY. 51% of inflation goes to OSS projects and 49% goes to Patrons. Therefore, OSS projects always have a slightly higher APY.
Commit farming is not live yet. We will share more details when this is live. The basic understanding is to offer the tools for projects to easily configure these programs themselves. SourceCred would be an ideal solution here. In regards to non-commit contributions this is similar to every crypto project. The question of how to allocate tokens across your team is based up to the maintainer/admin.
Staking DEV for an OSS project is considered a vote in the active governance of allocating the inflationary funding. When Governance launches this year only active members staking DEV will be able to vote on the protocol’s parameters in live time with a 24 hour delay.
