👩‍💻 Developer Incentives — Issue No. 8

🗞 News

A tweet by Naval Ravikant sparked a heated discussion about developer incentives in the crypto world. Some advice: skip the drama and just check out this summary. Link.

Amidst mostly noise, some genuinely interesting perspectives did surface. David King, for example, laid out a cogent argument that the Bitcoin ecosystem is under-provisioned with regards to developer talent. Link.

A harbinger to this discussion, Jill Carlson penned a must-read piece earlier this month. In it, she explained in precise terms the state of funding for various kinds of projects, including what’s missing and how we might approach solving the issue. Link.

For even more thoughtful analysis on funding the development of crypto projects, and open source more generally, read this (or any) writing by Nadia Eghbal. Link.

The only thing I’ll add is my own personal experience. I’m a long-time developer running a small, successful consultancy. I have a deep, intrinsic desire to be doing work in crypto and spend a lot of time doing so, mostly for fun. But I still need to pay the bills. It’s been difficult to find serious crypto projects with budgets for good developers— except for scammy ICOs. I have been approached by a number of those, and I have politely declined. Perhaps Naval is on to something.

📊 Statistics

Augur blew by it's goal of having $1M staked in the first week. The decentralized prediction market, running on Ethereum, now has $1.41 Million at stake. Link.