This is epicenter episode 257 with guests. Kevin iwaki. This episode of epicenter is brought to you by Dutch hex, the fair and secure decentralized exchange platform bike gnosis to learn how you can build apps, which leverage, Dutch axes, liquidity tool, visit epicenter, .t V, /, Dutch x and by Microsoft Azure configure and
deploy. A Consortium Network and just a few clicks with pre-built configuration and enterprise-grade infrastructure, spends less time on blockchain, scaffolding and more time, building your application. Learn more at aka.ms/offweb eccentric. Hi, welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and starts driving decentralisation and the global blockchain Revolution. My name is Sebastian with you
and my name is Philip Rica ants. And today on the show, we have Kevin a walkie Kevin's. The founder of real interesting
project called get coin. That is creating a two-sided Market between project funders and so basically people who work on open source projects and contributors who who pick up Bounty requests and it's real interesting project where there is this sort of its All incentive mechanisms are aligned between, you know, people who need bounties picked up for their open source projects and people who are willing to come up and make a bit of money while they're at it.
So, what did you think of the interview for Lika? I thought it actually integrates the project actually integrates into the existing ecosystem really nicely. It's one of the buildings, blocks that that was missing. I really enjoyed the interview. Yeah, well I thought was fascinating to is that like they built this and bootstrapped it and haven't done an IC o----? I mean it's just like it's a
very simple platform. In fact, I mean we'll get into this in turn the show but the like they haven't yet figured out their business model but there's you know, this guy boostrap this this project and now a bunch of projects are using it for bounties. So yeah. It's quite interesting. Yeah. That's actually quite Quite a good thing.
And I mean, I think this has been lost a little bit in the in the blockchain word building something first making sure who acts and then selling it later so it was very refreshing. Yeah, it does, it does work because there's like quite a few projects that build on and in fact, so kenosis did use it. I think you mentioned during a hackathon, can you talk about
that? Yeah. So basically, there was East Berlin that we had here in been in a couple of weeks ago and we actually Used Bitcoin to actually roll out the bounties to the developers who partook in the hackathon, and at what work nicely. So yeah, kudos to get kind great. Yeah, so we'll get to the interview in just a second first. I just wanted to mention that we will be at web three Summit in Berlin, that is next week.
It is Monday Tuesday and Wednesday, I believe and we're also going to be at Defcon 3 so both Brian. Ryan and myself. Oh, and Sonny will also be a dick on Defcon three diff gone for things are moving so fast already. Yeah. So we'll all be at Defcon 4 so you can come say hi to us there and we'll be glad to see you. Yeah, without further delay. Here's here's Kevin. Noah a walkie of get coin. Hi. So we're here with Kevin iwaki. Who is founder of get coin? Kevin, thank you for coming on
the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. So before we get started, what you tell us a bit about your background, you came from software development.
What got you involved and interested in crypto currencies and ethereum Yeah. So I have a degree in computer science from University of Delaware in 2006 and I've sort of always been interested in entrepreneurship and technology and and how I could how I can beat a path for myself, that was outside of outside of corporate America and not sort of a
traditional career path. And I think that that's always been driven by my intellectual curiosity and in in the evolution of the web and futurism and in cypherpunk ideas. So I spent the first two years of my career in Corporate America and absolutely hated. It found an opportunity to move out to Colorado, where I was the CTO of an online-dating. Startup of all things for about
five years. And that was a great experience that sort of threw me in the deep end of technology and Entrepreneurship. I've Around between technology startups for the last 10 or 12 years and was sort of captured in 2011, by the Bitcoin white paper.
And the idea of non-state money, the idea that money could be a native protocol of the internet, but it wasn't until the etherium whitepaper more around 2014 2015, that I really got into the idea of programmable money and was really, it was conversation As with my friend Piper Miriam, who's now a python team leader at the etherium foundation that really got me into the idea of programmable money and what if we could program our values into our money and that money those values?
And those smart contracts were immutable what kind of world what kind of better worlds that that could we create and so sort of just sort of really curious about exploring those themes on today's show and in general and professionally Awesome. I mean I definitely can relate reading the theorem white paper was also quite eye-opening for me and sort of for us in general here, on the podcast before we get in to get coin and go more
in-depth here. I'm curious what was the single most single most important lesson you learned while working for a dating company was the most single more in most important question that I learned, you said, you learned a lot of things but what's your takeaway from Working couple of years of the dating company. I think liquidity matters. We we ran an online, dating some company for five years and I think that we had 90% men on our platform and only 10% women.
It created a real liquidity problem for supply and demand problem in the double sided Market. That was a was a dating site. I think that's probably the case for a lot of dating sites. If you just look under the look Under the hood. Yeah. Yeah. Under the hood. Cool. And so you said your transition out of that and into into blockchain.
So as a developer and working on open source projects what did you see as some of the fundamental issues there and some of the fundamental problems in open source development. Yeah so been an entrepreneur and software engineer for pretty much since I since I joined that textures company in 2008.
So about Ten years now. And the one thing I noticed was that everything that I was doing and all of my cohorts we're doing is built off of Open Source, web servers and database, servers and Technology. But there's no the value that's created by open source. Technology is in the billions of dollars, but the value that's captured by it is, is much, much less than that. And it just seems like a real incentive problem that you can create billions of dollars of economic output.
But with with open source software, but you can't capture any of that. So I am interested in exploring how to solve that Gap and I think that programmable money might be a useful tool in solving that problem Cliff. So what then you started get coin. Can you explain to us what Bitcoin is and how it dresses that problem? Yeah, sure happily. So get coin is not a token. We have not decided our business model yet and there's no Ico or no token.
Get coin is a place where you can get coins if you're a software engineer. So it's a double sided Market where people who want to fund development specifically, open-source software development can put an ear, see 20, which is the ethereum token. Standard bounty on any GitHub issue, GitHub issues being where people check track change requests, whether they're bug requests or feature requests on GitHub and that will be paid out when that GitHub issue is closed
to date. We've done about two thousand. Actions between about 200 funders and 600 coders all across the world. And so our mission is to support open source, software to grow and sustain open source, software and bounties is just sort of the first, the first act in how we're going to grow and sustain open source software, and allow software developers to capture some of that value that open-source software creates in the world.
Quit quit. Can you describe how the user experience is both as a funder and as a contributor? Because they differ from each other, right? Yeah, that's right. So, if you go to get coin .ko, / new, you will see our funder onboarding experience. And, basically, the way it works, is that if you have a GitHub issue, you can paste that into the GitHub issue, URL field
on that form. And then, We'll pull in a title, a description of that issue, a bunch of keywords and then you can basically tag that Bounty with some metadata and attached etherium or any ear. See 20 token to that to That Bouncy. And when you click submit, you'll be asked to confirm the submission of that bounty to get coin in the staking of those tokens to that Bounty.
Once the transaction clears, your issue will be posted on the GitHub issue Explorer, which is the repository of Open work on on get coin. And it will also be emailed out to our community of 11,000 software developers who are looking to contribute to open source software.
So we found that the combination of the tooling with trustless Bounty posting and then also the the community that's watching that tooling has been a killer app for funders to instantly add software developers to their project and as we know in the blockchain world software, Our developers are pretty important.
Addition to to any project. And, you know, we're happy to be sort of a recruiter for software development projects in that respect and that's why people have put over 300,000 dollars worth of bounties on get coin to reach our audience of 11,000 software developers. So and then to answer the second part of your question. If you are a coder on get coin, you can go to the get coin issue, Explorer, or just keep an
eye on your inbox. And if there is a issue that matches your skill set and you have the time and gumption to turn around that issue, you can click a button called start work, which basically is a signal to the rest of the network that I'm working on this. Please don't work over top of me. And then typically, because software development is sort of an abstract thing, there's a little bit of back and forth that happens with the funder or the repo maintainer on the
GitHub issue. And we think that at GitHub is an excellent collaboration layer for open-source software. We are not in the business of Reinventing the wheel. We're just adding in incentivization layer on top of github's collaboration layer and so we put a lot of the collaboration type stuff over on the GitHub thread because it's working really well, and that's where open source software is
hosted. You'll probably go back and forth with the funder a couple of times about what they meant about specific parts of the scope. You will turn around a pull request, which is a Request for that piece of software. And then when you have when you're ready to attest, that you have finished with the work, you will press a button called submit work, which is basically a way of saying here is my my my aetherium address. Please pay me for the work that I've done.
And then once the funder is happy with that, work, they will submit the payment to you and that's sort of the life cycle of a get coin Bounty. What we found is that this is a low-risk way for coders and people who would hire them. Them to work together. And often times people take their relationship off, get coin after they found someone who can provide value to to their project and vice versa.
So are very happy to have facilitated over a dozen full-time, people working in the space that otherwise would not have built those relationships. So it's a that's the one metric that I'm most proud of is lives changed people who are now working professionally in the Block Chain space and otherwise wouldn't be and yeah that's the user that's you. Their experience and get Cohen on both sides of the market.
It just takes it is if I just sort of recap here as a as a project maintainer, let's say maintain open source project and there are those issues coming in. So I could be creating these issues these issues myself. My team could be submitting these issues. Users could be submitting these issues as well. They show up in GitHub, this is typically, what people are used to. When using GitHub, is the You see issues tool there. And then usually, there's there's some sort of curation of issues.
So, issues might get tagged as like a bug, a feature, like a critical security patch or something of that nature. Then as the software maintainer as a project maintainer, or I guess the funder, I put that issue up on on, get coin that creates sort of The the call to the market to call upon developers to address this issue on the other side of the market developers or contributors can pick up these issues, I guess
when they're picked up there. Sort of no longer available to the market while that person is working on them and when they're so you. And there might be some back-and-forth that makes sense. Then when the issue has been resolved, the pull request gets sent on GitHub and the project
maintainer. Then when he approves it, the get coin automatically makes the payment which I forgot to mention, which is sort of an escrow, I guess while the issues being worked on, is that sort of summarizes correctly. Yeah, that's pretty much the long and short of it. Yeah. Okay. Now, so if looking at this, I can see a couple things I want to address. So the first would be with regards to just like let me get get get Hub itself, seems pretty well placed to implement the system.
I mean, if GitHub wanted to implement some sort of a bug Bounty reward system, I mean it would be pretty trivial for them to implement that, you know, implement it into the issues. Form like a fun project maintainer can put up a bounty that money gets held in escrow by get by GitHub. And then when the issue gets resolved, you know, the payment gets made, they could even, you know, handle dispute resolution this sort of thing. I mean like these types of
things exist. You know if you just look at Fiverr or any type of like gig economy platform, these things exist. Why do you think this is never been part of GitHub? You know, business model to implement this sort of thing. Why do you think they've not went down that path? It seems like like a pretty easy thing for them to do. You know, it's funny.
It's apropos that you're asking me this question right now while I'm in San Francisco. I'm actually from Colorado, but I'm out in San Francisco because we're sponsoring GitHub Universe right now. We think that they've built an excellent collaboration layer and our aim is to be the incentivization layer that's built on top of that collaboration layer and to your point, this idea has been tried
before. I think that for the first three months of when I started get coin, every hackathon I went to A couple of software Engineers or like, why don't we combine open source and blockchain and, you know, see what happens.
But, you know, there's a certain amount of I think of a lead that get coins built up because of my backgrounds, 10 years of doing Tech startups and experience with with software engineering, that that I think has created some momentum for us, in the Brand's category and also in marketing and you know, we'll get into it later, but we're backed by consensus, which is the largest Blockchain accelerator in the world.
So I think we've reached achieved a scale in our user experience in the liquidity of the pool of software developers on get coin. That's, that's, that's sort of approaching a competitive Advantage. But the thing that I'll say is that there there is a people have noted this this incentive problem in open source, software in the past, namely that it's easy to create value. But it's hard to capture value. The fundamental, Friends with get coin relative to Let's Bounty sources.
For example, a web to version of get coin and they've been around for about 10 years. The reason why get coin has a fundamental competitive advantages because there's actually funding available for open source software in blockchain. The combined market cap of all these cryptocurrencies is in the hundreds of billions of dollars in. This is even in a bear market and everyone's chasing too few developers to get attention to their project. So there's there's a fundamental
shift in the way. Oi software development is being funded associated with blockchain and I think that we're probably the first, the, the first company that's that's that's figured out how to capitalize on that and create a liquid market for for software bounties. And, you know, just to bring it back to the to the GitHub question, we would absolutely love to partner with them and to bake our features more into the user interface.
So you know, we'll see what happens with our sponsorship of GitHub universe. But Looking to exit the blockchain echo chamber and to bring the goodness of software development bounties and funding to the broader open-source community. You know, the Dutch have given us so much orange. Carrots, Bluetooth, artificial hearts, even Donuts were invented by Dutch people, but they also gave us Dutch auctions, which, as it turns out
are great for decentralized. Exchanges Dutch, X is a decentralized trading protocol for ERC 20 tokens and it's invented designed and built by kenosis current order book based exchanges. Whether centralized or decentralized have a couple of issues, Miners and exchanges can FrontRunner trade when they step in front of a large order to gain an economic Advantage. Not not to mention issues with securing funds, High listing fees, lack of liquidity and pricing efficiencies. The Dutch checks.
Exchange platform uses a Dutch auction mechanism to determine the fair value for a token and participants in a trade are encouraged to reveal their true willingness to pay, which eliminates front running as a permissionless on chain protocol. It's useful for Bots and other smart contracts needing to exchange tokens and Dutch X also acts as an oracle for dash, requiring a price feed.
So to learn more, check out the documentation at epicenter dot TV, / THX, Smart contracts are live on a theorem a net. So you can start building today we'd like to thank gnosis and checks for their support of epicenter will maybe get into this a bit later and to sort of like the the usage of the platform but it sounds like what you're saying that most of the projects and I guess it doesn't make sense. The most of the projects that are on the marketplace are
blockchain related projects. Are you seeing any sort of adoption from web to projects other open source? Facts. No, not really. I think that 95% of the projects that we've, that we've seen on the platform are blockchain based projects. And I think that that's a, that's, that's sort of a result of where our efforts have been and where we are, have been able to find funding for for open-source software.
We've gotten grants from the theory and Community Fund in the ethereum foundation themselves, maker dial, stable fund, all of these projects want to accelerate blockchain development, And help if they're IAM 2.0 and projects based on a theory and go to market faster. And we also want to see that
happen. So it's went been where our Focus has been and I think that that's healthy for where the the blockchain space it is right now, but eventually, we're going to shift our Focus to the broader open source market and our sponsorship of GitHub Universe in San Francisco. This week is just sort of our first litmus test for what that's going to look like in 2019. In 2020 quit. So you've already mentioned a couple of names. It can you go into what projects
I've already successfully? Pound successfully posted bounties on your project. Yeah sure. Happy to. And the other thing that I'll note is that I think transparency is a really important value for a blockchain project and as part of that ethos, we've built to the get coin leaderboard which you can access a get coins. KO / leaderboard and always see an updated version of the answer. I'm about to give you, but you have to answer your question.
We've done a handful of bounties with metal mask, which is the largest etherium based browser wallet in the world. We have done some bounties with the etherium foundation itself. Get coin is built with get coin. So anytime I have a software development task that I don't have time for or I am not a subject matter expert in we Put a bounty on get coins, open source, repo and build get coin with get coins.
So it's been a way that we've been able to do a lot with a, with a small team Market protocol, which is a derivatives trading platform on aetherium, has used us to lat. And if you go down the list, you can see names like decentraland and furo cybercom cyber Congress, auger web 3j giveth.
We've done projects or bounties with a lot of different projects in the space and it's been a real blessing to earn from all of the different use cases that people are trying to build an etherium because they're quite fast. So maybe this is the time to go into some stats, you actually have quite an extensive stats section on on your website. So how many bounties are there on? Get coin total Right. Thanks.
Yeah, as you noted, if you go to get coin dot Coast results, you can always see our updated stats in the reason that we've done that is because people typically see the get coin landing page. And they say, oh, this looks well done. And it's a good idea, but does it work well? Hey, flip over to this stat section. And here's all our numbers, you think it's working?
And yeah, the to answer your question, we've done almost about 1,000, bounties on on get coin over the last year, and we also have the A feature called tips which is just it's just sending money from from person a to person B. And we've done about 1,000 of those for a total of two thousand transactions. We have done a total in three hundred and forty three thousand dollars worth of total platform
value on get coin. And if you break that down by month, it's sort of on an upward slope as we get get more adoption in the space over time and We've helped, let's see. The stat. The most current stat is 220. Funders, reach an audience of just over 10,000 developers and complete, two thousand transactions with 550 unique coders. So that's, that's sort of the volume that's going through the double sided Market.
In total on a per unit basis. If you post a bounty on get coin, you can expect that it will be started within seven hours. That's the median Bounty start time and you can expect that it Will be turned around at about 85 percent success rate, once it's started and that will usually take about six days for the median Bounty, the hourly rates on the platform are between 20 and 60 dollars, which
is quite a wide range. But I think that, you know, we're starting to put more analytics into what the hourly rates are for specific Bounty types. Because we think that right now get coins buoyed by the fact that everyone's searching for software developers in the
blockchain space. And so there's a lot more demand than there is Supply. But over time, we think it's really important for the brand that there's healthy hourly rates for get coin bounties because you know, we don't want to be another fiver or another up work, where it's just sort of seen as a race to the bottom. We think it's really important to provide leverage for software developers, to lead better lives in, to get involved, in a were in a space.
That's that's making the world better. And so, we're really, we're really focused on that hourly rate number as get Coin grows from having 200 funders to 1000 funders and Beyond. What so here, well, I think you do you name the numbers so we could do the math. So what's the, what's the average funding of a bounty? Yeah, the average funding of a bounty is about $170. Cool and other bounties that don't get collected.
Yeah, one of the things that we've found is that and I'm really glad you asked this question. Because if you think about the gig economy, I think an example, everyone's really used to is Uber right with Uber, you take me from A to B and you do it safely. And, you know, there's no weird quirks and I'll give you five stars and I'll give you a tip, right?
But with software development, it's a little bit different because if I'm asking you to do software development for you I'm inherently a You to do something, that's pretty abstract, right? I would like feature X but then maybe I'll get a submission. That looks like feature x sub Prime and then and then I'll say back to the to the coder.
Oh you know I really wanted x sub prime one but I just was only able to elaborate it progressively and and I think that you know that's that's sort of one of the more happy paths on get coin. And we always ask that people set aside. A little bit of budget to deal with Progressive elaboration on on their bounties.
But I think that I think that there's there's sort of like a failure case here in which I either ask for too much and I haven't funded the Bounty at a level in which it's going to get picked up. We call that underfunding, there is a failure case called Under scoping of your issue.
So if you just put up something that's not really comprehensible and you don't provide the right documentation for how to understand the mission of the project and the ethos of the project, and how to spin up the docker container for it. Then you're not going to get a lot of bites.
And I also think that quite candidly get coin is not one giant double sided Market where a bunch of small, double sided markets for python development and JavaScript development, and solidity, development and security.
It hunts, and each of these little niches are their own little double sided Market. It's kind of like, if you go on air B&B and you search for a house in New York, the liquidity and Florida doesn't help you with your with your house, or with your, with your search in New York, and it's very much the same way when you're searching for a bounty hunter on, get
coin. So I think that there are some some niches that we haven't figured out exactly how to penetrate within within software development. Probably compiler compiler bounty. Is, I haven't seen a ton of those so I'll just we'll call that the example and get coins, trying to get better at building the muscle to instantly scale a double sided Market as soon as there's demands. But we're only a small team and we haven't quite gotten there yet.
So, the third category of failure, case that I'm sort of trying to describe here is not enough liquidity in the market and it's that's the one that I think that we're really focused on improving in 2019. I have two little follow-up questions. So one, the first one is so how much back and forth is that typically between the funder and the person actually working on the Bounty? And secondly, what kind of dispute resolution do your
offer? So basically if I find an issue and I get an absolutely subpar response and they want to collect the Bounty for that. How do I, what would I do as the funder? Yeah. So to answer your question, we've seen on average three or four comments on GitHub threads between when the bounty is posted and when it's actually submitted. So I think that's the answer to your first question. The, the answer your tears. Sweat, second question is, how does dispute resolution on on get coin work?
And so the thing that we're trying to instill in our funders here is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And so the first thing that That you can do is do a really good job of scoping out what you want to see and what your coding standards are, what the acceptance criteria for your Bounty, is not all funders do this, but the ones that do CC way less disputes. Another feature that we offer is called permission bounties.
So if you're asking for something that requires a new skill set or subjective submission criteria, for example, I do a lot of design bounties on get coin and if I don't like someone's design, It doesn't mean that their submission was wrong. It just means that I'm not gonna be able to use it because it aesthetically doesn't Vibe with with what I'm trying to do. So approval approval required.
Bounties are another way to prevent disputes from happening and and so we've tried to do that convinced funders to use that as much as possible. That's that's prevented a lot of disputes and then and then so the the the question becomes well what if those two Preventive measures don't work. Then what happens? And so I think that there's two levels of answering your question. With respect to how dispute resolution works on get coin. One is what's the trustless dispute?
Resolution immutability layer forget coin and the second one is what are the social norms that are acceptable in open source software and specifically on get coin? Now get coin is one of the first bouncy networks that actually has scale and that people are actually using the I'm smart contracts to work for their first crypto instead of buying
their first crypto. And so, I think that we're an interesting test case here, we're also very lucky to be working on open source software, where there's sort of social norms around what's acceptable. Because everything you do is for the most part, tied to your real identity, your GitHub profile which is tied to your, to your real identity. So we're lucky that there's an ethos and open source software where we treat each other like humans.
And also it's connected to our to our real-world identity and that creates a social Norm ERM where the acceptable, you know, if someone submits it something that I truly isn't usable and it's it's not against if it's against my specifications, then I'll go back to them and say, hey can you please revise this and maybe they will. Maybe they won't if they do then maybe we're back on the happy path.
And if they don't then we're maybe I'll tip them. 20% in exchange for their time and move on to the next contributor. We haven't seen any disputes actually escalated to get coin core yet. We do know that as we scale, that it's something that we're going to have to be able to deal with. The plan is to leverage delfi Network, which is an arbitration platform that's being built by by the bounties Network and other consensus project.
And the way it's going to work is that in, in our Bounty smart contract. There's there's an address which right now is the null address but eventually, it'll be a smart contract. That's the represents five, Arbiters and three. Out of five, Arbiters will have to vote in your favor in order to send the steak to the, to the
funder, or to the coder. So we've put a lot of thought into this and we don't have it live yet but in the the tldr is that in the meantime, social norms have have sort of allowed us to create a good user experience without the backing of that smart contract. Trustless layer If you've listened to previous episodes with Marley gray and Matt koerner, you know, that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise-grade tools and infrastructure for
blockchain developers. Well, the Azure blockchain workbench is perfect for organizations building. Consortium networks. Take the etherium proof of authority template, for example, it's ideal for permission. Networks were consensus, participants, are known and reputable. A theorem on Azure has on chain Network governance, that leverages parodies extensible, proof of authority. Client, each Consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their
consensus. Disciplines to a trusted operator and parodies. Webassembly support allows developers to write smart contracts and for many languages like C C++ and rust as your blockchain workbench was created on the same principles that drive all Production Services in Azure. So, you know you're relying on secure redundant infrastructure, that can scale and we built in services. Like authenticating apis off chain databases and secure Key Management Services.
You can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours to learn more about Azure blockchain workbench and how Microsoft is dancing. Blockchain usability, and Enterprise, check out aka.ms/offweb the center and start building today. We'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of epicenter on the topic of dispute resolution. I mean, this is something that we've covered I feel like in previous episodes but do so you know you mentioned delfi network is as a potential dispute
resolution mechanism. I'm not super familiar how it works but do you envision that You said earlier, you know, there are sort of like different markets so you might have JavaScript development or python development or you know at some point that if sequence successful you might see get coin, open up and get into other types of software development. That isn't specifically. The blockchain could be like security or Linux development, or Windows development, do you
envision a future where? As a, as a project funder? I would specify my dispute resolution mechanism. And so the one that best works for my specific use case. And also where I know that I'm going to find competent, dispute, resolution, Arbiters. Yeah, that's a really good
question. And I think that Dispute resolution is is something that's hopefully, we're going to see a lot more momentum in the broader space in in blockchain, in 2019, the way, the get coin smart contracts are architected is that we're using standard bounties, which is a standard VIP want to 1081, which is the standard for bounties on ethereum. And there's actually an address field on the smart contract that allows you to plug in play any arbitration Network that exists on a theory.
And so I think that we're most excited about the delfi network and what they're doing with with arbitration. But as a funder, you'll be able to build in any number of arbitration networks because of the extensibility.
The modular design of that smart contracts. so at the moment, get coin primarily is hosting bounties for the blockchain, ecosystem, blocking projects and I guess what would be desirable, it would be to see that expand into sort of broader development, brought our open source development, so companies like Facebook and Google and other large web to companies you agree use bounties to Identify security vulnerabilities on their systems for example, that has been quite successful.
I think for many of them, do you see get coin moving into the closed-source software space and how would that play out in your in your view? Yeah, I think that by and large the ethos of the project right now, it's stated. Read our mission page is to grow and sustain open source software. The commons of the software development world and I think that our mission is is one of the big reasons why people choose to do bounties on get
coin people. I like to say that you we as as web, three designers need to design for humans and not just wallets. And one of the things that we've learned about human beings is that they decide to do work. Not only based upon the compensation that they're doing but also upon the impact that that work is going to have both on their own lives and skill sets, but on the World At Large and also whether or not it aligns, With their values.
And I think that the open source source, ethos of get coin has really buoyed us as we've as we've been coming out of seed stage and growing a little bit larger. Now that being said, there is a large portion of the world that operates on Norms of closed-source software, and we do plan on building a bridge. From the open the community of get coin contributors that are right now focused on open source and building a bridge to close Source bounties.
And you know, you can expect that in the future. If you post a bounty on get coin on a closed Source repo it'll maybe have an option to India contributor and give you instant access to the code base as soon as you're accepted on that Bounty so that's a feature set that you could that you could hope to see in the future. And really what? I think that we're disrupting when we go into closed source.
Is software development recruitment and anyone who who's been on LinkedIn for more than six months knows that software development recruitment is broken. And there's not you know it or if you've spent some time doing whiteboard interviews then I think that you might think that your interview for a position as a software engineer in in in a major tech company. Maybe doesn't approximate what the real world user experience of working.
Being in that company is and the reason why we want to enter closed Source bounties is that we think that bounties are fundamentally a better way to hire software developers than than white board interviews or spray-and-pray. LinkedIn messages. I mean you can basically just set up a screening Bounty for your company and not work on something that approximates what it would be like, working at that company, but actually work on work that you'd be doing if
you worked at that company. And that's a really great way to understand and a low pressure way. No whiteboard interviews, no long phone calls, no recruiter screens. That's a way to try before you buy on hiring and so we think that that's a potential. Not only new feature for get coin but that's a potential Revenue opportunity for the project in the future. So I just decide question what's a white board interview?
Oh, white board interview is if you're recruiting for a software development job, you'll probably go through a phone screen and then you'll get invited on site. And then you'll be asked to stand up in front of a whiteboard in front of a couple people who would be your teammates and sort of binary
tree or something like that. Basically, the complaint that software developers often have about whiteboard interviews is that if you want to sort of binary tree and your day job, you just Google how to do it, and then you just coat it in front of your computer, but a lot of software developers are socially anxious, and so, standing up in front of a white board and writing something down. In explaining, your thoughts in front of a panel of three to
five people. Oil is not really a good approximation of what it's like to do the job there. And so, that's sort of what a whiteboard interview is and why it's bad in in 25 seconds. So are you saying you see this more as a springboard to actually get a stable employment with, with the company? Yeah, I mean, I think that, in some cases bounties are springboard to get stable
employment with the company. We've also seen people that are interested in just working for bounties because they like the variety and we have a contributor in Nigeria and we have a contributor in India who are making Western wages by just working for get coin. And so we've sort of seen both categories of people on the application. So typically people also see themselves as part of a company. I think this is one of its kind of where people obtain meaning.
I was one of the things that lets people have a narrative about their own life and tell people what they do for a living, and who they work for? What, what that, what they do. Exactly. So in the gig economy, that, that is, something that is lost a little bit, right? So, The connection between the company itself and the employee.
And my question is is twofold. So do you think this is this is something that a lot of people actually want do they want to be Freelancers and not be tied down but also not have that feeling of belonging to a company but also how does that actually pan out for the companies? So basically if your company and you actually have You do you do a lot of your development work? Your external externalize, it by by funding bounties.
You actually have to specify everything to an excruciating detail to actually get good results. Add to me, it seems like that wouldn't work for any kind of tasks and of course, there are tasks where this works perfectly. But as soon as they actually, if they actually have an effect on the system architecture, for instance, this kind of Sound. I mean obviously that that were contained tasks like security testing and and small issue a small tickets that you can specify well.
But do you think this actually scales can you build an entire company just by putting out bounties? Okay, so a good really good question. I think that we're building and I'm going to come back to your question but first to frame the my answer. I think that we're building a completely open source The system that's based on money becoming a core protocol of the internet as opposed to something that was just bolted on, on the,
on the side. And I think that right now, 95% of the applications in the open-source Financial system, our web Wall Street 3.0, sort of financial speculation applications. And I am very, very happy to be exploring the ideas of what do open source Financial system, jobs look like and I think that there is One macro theme that sort of is, is perpendicular to that open source Financial
system jobs idea. And that's what happens to jobs if and when they're unbundled from what traditional employment
looks like. So, you know, not to expand the scope of your question, but I think a lot of, like, what keeps me up at night is, you know, what happens in in this new ecosystem, to health insurance, and, to into retirement plans, and to the stability associated with With a traditional employment agreement and there's a company in Boulder Colorado called topless, which is, which is working on that, which I'm very excited about, they want to provide self Sovereign
employment that you carry with you, from job to job and see your health insurance. In your retirement is just sort of like, part of this. This dowel that comes with you from company to company. But to specifically address, what you asked me about, which was Was, which was, you know, do people want to go from company to company and you have to specify things in excruciating detail if you for every single task that's out there in your company, I think that there's
two major axes. Like there's a trade-off here between stability and variety of both stability of work, and variety of work and stability of of who you're working with and variety of recruitment that comes in. And so, the thing that I'll I'll say is that we think that bounties are just our first act. And we're going to be expanding outside of just Bounties in the future. We think that. So there's this computer science cliche that they taught me in computer science 101, which I'm
going to repeat here. And that's that, if the only tool that you have in your hand, your toolbox is a hammer. Then, every problem looks like a nail and bounties are amazing. I love the bounties Network. I love the ability to instantly. You recruit software Engineers to to get coin. But I think that they're only good for for specific Niche tasks where you don't need to have a lot of trust.
You don't need to provision access, you don't need to give a lot of context and so the next product that we're going to be launching on get coin, is going to be a tool for you to basically give a stipend to an open-source contributor over. Time to contribute to your software development repo and the idea there is that I will use the the standard for subscriptions on aetherium, VIP 1337 to give you a grant or a stipend of four hundred dollars per month.
Let's say that I've worked with with you Frederica on on three or four bounties. I've gotten to a point where I can trust you. I know that you deliver good work and I don't want to spend a bunch of time specifying. Every single task that you do forget coin. I will give you a 400 die die as a stable coin. That's worth $1. I will give you a four hundred died a month Bounty and I'll just A give me $400 worth of value to my repo. You figure out what it is.
Here's your roadmap and you know thank you very much for becoming a maintainer of my repository. So I think that the short answer to your question is that bounties are great for adding variety to your repository, but people need they stability of traditional employment. And that will be our second act, and you can expect that feature to be launching some time in queue, for 2018. On get coin.
Okay, quiz that super interesting so you don't just have bounties, you'll also have grants the third thing that I actually thought about when I read your white paper is public goods. So do you think there's a way to actually fund public goods on your platform? So the thing that came to mind was in was a dominant Assurance contract. Yeah, so I mean, I think that a couple answers ago, I had mentioned that people want to do
work, not only the compensates. Well, but aligns, with their values and has a positive impact on themselves and on the world.
And one of the things that we found is that we're building this substrate for an open-source Financial system and in a way, you can make an argument that that some of the stuff that we're doing with the ethereum foundation and out, the protocol lever level is a public good and one of the Dynamics that I'm really excited about talking talking about with Back to this is the prospect of of crowdfunding a bounty.
So basically if you put forth an idea that's going to help increase the commons, then everyone should have an incentive to pile on and to add funding to make sure that that Bounty actually gets gets turned around and get coin, does support crowdfunding bounties and I think that we do need to do a better job of soliciting donations in crowdfunding
bounties. But I think that one of the key things with with supporting the Has is to align the in individual incentive of the profit incentive of a software developer. Everyone has to pay their mortgage and everyone has to put food on their table. You want to align that individual incentive with what's good for the community and I think an open-source Financial system is a really good place to start.
And there are other Commons that we need to support and structure once we solve the problem of an open-source Financial system. So I'm excited about Work bounties network is doing in bounties for the ocean, which is a bounty that you can get paid out if you if you clean up trash off of a beach, I'm excited about the way bounties can be applied to combine individual incentives with Community incentives in a number of different areas. And I hope that we see more of
that. Once we solve the fundamental incentive problem with the, with the traditional Financial system by creating an open-source Financial system. What? So, if as a contributor actually start working on the Bounty, I actually have to press a button that says start work, right? So, in that way, I can actually stop other people from working on the same problem and I
understand why. So, you don't want to create race conditions for contributors, which is nice for contributors and but as a funder and how do I actually make sure that the person who said they were going to work on this actually works on this? There's some sort of reputation That that is at stake. Should they should they not deliver or in effect? There's an opportunity cost for the funder so should locking these issues be priced in some
way? Yeah, that's a really great question and I'm glad that you asked it. The one thing I'll say is that the start work button, locks the bounty in our traditional bouncy type, but we do have contests in Cooperative bounties, which Cooperative bounties allow you to work together with other people say, You're a designer and I'm a front-end engineer. We are skill sets complement each other and we can complement the we can cooperate on Bounty
with competitive bounties. It's more of a race to get things done and these are sort of dicey because you don't want to introduce spec work on to your platform spec. Work is is speculative work that you don't know if you're actually going to get paid now. So there's a predatory element to spec work that we want to keep off of the platform but there is a Valid use case for contest bounties, namely in the
sense of like a security bouncy. Where if you get an exploit, then you should be able to get paid for that that exploit. And I think that that's a healthy use of of contest, type bounties, but specifically to your question, I'm sorry. Could you? So your question was was was about the race condition of start work. Would you mind repeating it real quick?
Yeah, so sure. So basically the question was as a The the issue actually gets look for other contributors because they know someone is working on this, but there's a funder. But do I have control over the contributor that actually takes this? Do they have reputation? Can I say? No, I don't want this guy. They haven't delivered on the past three issues or they say I'm working on this and then they, then they then they never heard from again.
So, should they actually have to put up some funds that are slashed if they don't deliver? Or should they have a reputation system? Where you can see? This person has consistently delivered for other projects. I should trust them as well, with locking this bounty, and making this an available for other people, right? Okay. Yeah. Thanks for reorienting me there. Yeah, so the, we have permissioned bounties, which is I'll select the contributor, they'll apply and I'll select them.
And then we also have permission list which is just anyone can start and work on the bounty, we have found that there's a small issue with Bounty abandonment which is basically someone claims they're going to work on something and then they go on. Sail sailing for two weeks and then they don't come back or they're just not being responsive. And so we have sort of a slashing condition they're in which will Mark prominently on their profile.
This person is not commutative and they might just bail on you. So I think that reputation is sort of being built there and one of the items on the roadmap for early 2019 is the ability to not only have permissions bounties and permissionless bounties but have a third option to steak semi Sure that says that you're actually serious about getting this done and so I think that that's a crypto staking is a crypto economic
primitive. That's obviously, the ethereum foundation is excited about with respect to Casper and other projects are excited about and we will be building that into get coin in early 2019. So moving on to the next topic and you mentioned it, briefly previously is the EIP 1 through 37 or leet and is it is a proposed standard for subscriptions on blockchain. This is a proposal that you made on an EIP system and is for the ERC 948 token standard. Tell us about this token standard.
And I, you're advocating for it, right? Well, so as you noted, its VIP 1337, which was an EIP number that I was watching for about about a month and a half, for those of the, those of you who don't know, 1337 stands for elite which is short for elite. And it's one of the, I think it's from Gamers back in the day if you got like a headshot in, do more something, you would say, oh, that's soul. Eat. But old geek reference. It's a, it's an old geek reference. Thank you. You're more clear.
How many people how many people you think we're looking at this VIP? Like just waiting for it to come up and posting something on it? I've met at least one person who's like on, man, you got it and I didn't, but the way I got, it was I wrote a python script that sent me a copious number of text messages when it was available. But anyway, so that's just the number and it surely lead, sir. Yeah, that's that's sort of some of like the geeky history there.
But the reason for the, for the standard is that I think that we're building an open-source Financial system, and I think that tokens in ico's or just the First Act of this world financial computer that we're building, I think the ico's are really great for a lot of things, but I do think that subscriptions are a very healthy way of aligning, the incentives of depth, founders with consumers of depths and the issue that I always give to illustrate.
This is that when you want to subscribe to To Netflix, which is ten dollars a month. You just subscribe to Netflix because it's pretty low risk and there's not a high information barrier to subscribing to Netflix. I just pay $10 a month and I cancel down the line. If I'm not getting value from it, there's no white paper to read. You know, we're competing with utility tokens by the way, which there's a 45-page white paper to
read. You have to understand who the founders are what their vesting schedule is, what is the crypto economic primitive of this white paper? I just want to use your product, I don't want to have to do a ton of research and so and so Paying $10 a month. It's something that people are used to in the Legacy web and it's a low-risk way of trying things that that you can always cancel over time. If you're if you end up not using it or not getting value from it.
The other side of the coin is for adapt founder. So if you're adapt founder and you choose to do an IC 0, then you get a lot of money in the door, you have a little bit of regulatory uncertainty associated with that money, if you're in the United States, like I am and you basically have to build utility and then and then assume that you're the people who bought your tokens. The speculators are going to be the same people who are going to derive utility from your
platform. We think that subscriptions are a fundamentally better. Way to monetize your doubt because your speculative are there are no speculators. It's all just product Market fit, who's going to use my platform and also if I have X number of subscribers and I have y conversion rate and I have z turn rate, then I know my cash
flow. 12 months down the line. If you can find a nice you or token based system that knows their cash flow and 12 months, come find me. And and tell me about it because I don't think that that exists in the tokenization model and in to be clear, I think that ico's in token. Tokenization is fundamentally Innovative, but I think that subscriptions are meant to provide an alternative funding model Ford apps, that's proven out.
It works in Web 2.0 and and we think that it should exist in in web 3.0 And so what myself and the many many other, smart people who are involved in EIP 1337, have done, is we've created a standard for subscriptions on the blockchain that you will be able to just drop into your dap when we launched in two weeks at Defcon 4 in Prague.
So basically, the idea is that you just clone our repo and then you can instantly put subscriptions into your depth in. We have a, we have a reference implementation that's been security audited, and is ready to just be dropped. Opt-in to your repo. So you don't have to do a bunch of research in order to put subscriptions into your Dap. You can just, you can just clone the repo and put it in there, and hopefully, we'll see a proliferation of projects that monetize with subscriptions
instead of tokenization. After we launched at Devcon. At the end of October this year, Okay, so just understand how this works. So I'm a, I'm a adaptive, pelipper, I'm building. I don't know, some sort of a Dap to like a Marketplace for preferred to get issues or whatever. Okay, I'm bit I'll be I'm building a widget, you know, typically I would, I would, I would fund that with an IC o----, utility token or not.
That's not really the question here but You think that an alternative funding model and its really make sense would be to build that app and rather than go out and race, a bunch of money through Nico and distribute these utility tokens. You can simply open that product to the community as a user. I pay a monthly subscription in ether and I get access to the, to the DAP. How does that? How does that work? From a user's perspective?
Because I presume I mean you would want to have it done in such a way that the price would be may be fixed to something that more stable. Like dollars. Is that does that? Is that part of the standard or not? Yes. So he IP 1337 is built off of ERC 20, which is the token standard on ethereum. And we do think there is a use case for for any year, see 20 token but the ones that were most excited about are stable coins.
And so basically the way it works is that you will as a consumer that's going to Sebastian's widgets.com and wants to subscribe to it. You'll you'll be prompted to purchase a subscription and And you will sign in a transaction in meta mask. That is your consent to debit the let's call it. Ten died a month just to stick with that price point for Sebastian's, widgets Sebastian's, widgets ships, widgets to you once a month and you can revoke that consent at any time using the smart
contract. And basically, once you revoke consent, the provider will never be able to charge you again for for that widget purchase. And if You've coded Sebastian's widgets.com correctly. You'll stop sending widgets to the to that consumer. And so the idea is that you can trust this league create and revoke consent for those ERC, 20 tokens to be debited from your account using the smart
contract. This seems awfully similar to other solutions that people have implemented in the past for things like video, streaming, where there's essentially a payment Channel That's opened up and there are sort of transactions that are signed every second or whatever every time period and content. That is delivered in exchange. How different is that from from like a typical Co-payment Channel implementation. Got it. So, yeah, you're right. The, the sort of screaming money
use case. I think, is a really, really important one for the future of the open-source Financial web. And the one thing I'll say is that I'm on the business models, ring a teeth magicians, in, in Prague this, this fall and I'm by no means this subscriptions maximalist. I just I just think that you know, the more that we can explore these different business models, the better, the difference between And subscriptions and payment channels specifically is as a difference in granularity
subscriptions. The use case is a little bit more once a week and once a month and also there's an expectation of how you m the charges. So, basically, if if I'm paying for a video stream, just use your video streaming example, and I accidentally leave on my, my video stream for 72 hours. Then I'm liable to get charged for wait. More than I would if there is just a fixed price $10 a month subscription to to your video
channel. So I think that the two primary differences between the streaming money use case and subscriptions is a the granularity and B whether your metered based off of exact usage or just on a monthly or weekly basis. Cool, it's super glue, that's a fantastic VIP. When do you think it's going to
be available? So we're in a pending state right now, and there's a reference implementation that has been Then security audited that you can just drop into your dap right now on in the middle of October. The official launch is at Devcon for in Prague, which is two weeks away. And so if any of your listeners are going to be a Devcon for, please come find me. And I will give you a copious amount of Swag that all says, delete on it. So come find me at Defcon 4.
That's the, that's the official launch date October 30th. So fantastic. So we've spoken a lot about financing different things but we have we haven't spoken about financing get coin so how do you finance yourselves and how do you make sure you can pay out your own Bounty question.
The Bitcoin was initially funded by myself with the gains are made in the 2017 bull market for aetherium and I was lucky enough to be introduced to Joe Lubin who is a co-founder of aetherium and also the founder of consensus, the largest blockchain Venture studio in the world. I was lucky enough that he believed in our mission of growing and sustaining open source software and also realized that get coin is a bolt-on accelerants to his portfolio of 50 to 100 blockchain based projects.
So he has agreed to fund us while we explore the intersection of jobs and open source, software, and bounties, and subscriptions. And all of that, good stuff and and super thankful to Joe, and to the consensus mesh for being a supportive, Place to experiment on in this area, I
think that long term. We're trying to figure out what our business model is. We have made a decision that I cos are just the first killer app of the internet of money and we have a wider view than just tokenization and icos and don't want to just take the first exit ramp. That's, that's made available to us. I also think that tokenization and icos don't fundamentally. Align the incentives. Lives of our users and of the
founders of the network. And I think that for that reason, we've decided not to do an IC o---- at least for now I'm very excited about the possibility of subscriptions on get coin for all of the reasons that I've mentioned to you while we were talking about EIP 1337. I think that subscriptions are a great way of aligning incentives between users and zap Founders
over time. I do think that another model that we're looking at is The just taking a percentage of every Bounty that's on the platform that's completed successfully. If we're providing software developers to people who need software development. We think that if you consider the Block Chain development rush to be a gold rush, then I think that we're selling pick access
to the gold miners so to speak. And there's there's a there's a, I think there's a valid, reason why we should be taking maybe five or ten percent of each Bounty. But You know, we're not exactly sure about that.
That monetization model. And then the the last answer to your question is that get coin is launching a non fungible token at Devcon for this year and we have a business model that's built into that non fungible token that we're launching it Devcon and so I'm pretty excited to see whether or not people use the non fungible token and whether or not it's something. Thing that can provide us
Revenue at scale. So I guess that's my, my sort of like overview of the different monetization models that were looking at, but I will just repeat that. Joe Lubin has been the ultimate backer and consensus has been the ultimate support system. With a long-term view that is allowing us to explore this space and focus on our users without having to worry a ton about monetization yet and I'm very thankful to Joe and consensus for their support.
Can you expand on the non-functional token that you mentioned a little bit? Sure so the official launch is at Devcon and reading between the lines we've been pretty busy launching EIP 1337 and and the non fungible token at the same time. But we're supported by bounties and get coin has made made by get coins. So are our small 11 person team is really chugging, but we're supported by a community of 10,000. That's, it's helping us build this. So, Trying to launch two major things.
And in one week is, is is something that I think is within the realm of ability for us. But anyway, enough framing the the non fungible token that we're launching is called Kudos. And what it is is say you turn around a bounty on get coin and you did a really spectacular job. Get coin. Is issuing a Marketplace of beautiful artwork that are at test stations that you can attach to your your get In profile.
And so, you can, as you're paying out the Bounty, let's call it $170 bouncy because I told you that that's the average bounty on. Get coin for the price of a postage stamp which is about 40 cents. You can show your appreciation for the software developer in your life and sends them a JavaScript, ninja badge or a open-source sustainer badge, that they will be able to trade if they want to, if they don't care about it or they can just display it on there, get coin profile.
And again, this is like LinkedIn endorsements, but it's got beautiful. Teufel art associated with it
and it cost 40 cents. So, the price is negligible enough that people won't mind attaching it to a hundred and seventy dollar Bounty, but it's high enough that people won't just like endorsements, Pam, you like, you kind of see on on LinkedIn. So the, I guess, the short answer to your question is that we're launching an art Market Place on get coin that you can use to show appreciation for the software developers on your team that you're trying to recruit or
build a relationship with awesome. That's a great way to get people really excited about software development and open source. But Kevin, thank you so much for coming on today. It's great to have you talking about, get going and looking forward to seeing how the platform evolves in the future. It sounds like already.
It has picked up quite a bit of attention, from the, from the open source development community in sort of the broader ecosystem and I guess probably, we could, we could point to as at to it as one of the one of the platform's that's getting actual usage. And so, congratulations for that. Yeah, I thank you both for having me on the show and kudos for being great podcast, hosts. Thank you and I guess we'll see you at Defcon. See you there? All right, thank you again.
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