Our Mission: “Grow Open Source”

What is Gitcoin?

Gitcoin is an open source bounties platform on the Ethereum blockchain. We facilitate a space that allows open source developers to get paid for their work contributing to open source projects and in return, the open source projects get exposure to a vast community of hard working developers they might not have had otherwise.

We are a mission driven project whose primary goal is to grow the open source community by allowing for better incentivized collaboration in the realm of open source software.One thing that you will notice after exploring Gitcoin is that there is no token for the Gitcoin ecosystem. We support all ERC20 tokens in an effort to promote Ethereum as a whole.

Understanding How Gitcoin works

We’ve got some really great resources that can help you get up and running on Gitcoin.

Gitcoin For Contributors (Bounty Hunters, Developers)

If you’re a contributor, check out our Getting Started with Gitcoin post. This article will tell you all you need to know from opening a Gitcoin account to contributing to your first open source projects.We’ve written up some profiles on some of our most prominent Gitcoin contributors. Check out their stories to get a feel for how things work on the platform from the eyes of a seasoned developer

• Kenneth Ashley: Front-end developer who built Gitcoin Grants + more
• Will Goi: UI/UX Designer who built Gitcoin Requests

Gitcoin For Funders (Repo Maintainers)

If you’re a funder, you’ll want to check out our piece called Fund An Issue on Gitcoin. This one is similar to our contributor walkthrough except this one informs you how to go from opening your account to funding your first bounty on Gitcoin.

Funding an issue is a lot easier than it looks. One of the most important aspects of a newly funded issue is making sure that it’s sufficiently funded for the work being requested. To help with this, we’ve created a tutorial on ‘How to Price Work on Gitcoin’. This piece will show you things like historical data on past bounties, what their rates were, and how long it took for that bounty to be completed.Really impressed with how thoroughly a bounty was completed? Or how well a contributor communicated throughout the whole process? Send them a tip!For further help, we’ve pooled out knowledge and put together a ‘Gitcoin Best Practices’ piece. This should help you leverage Gitcoin’s tools to optimally connect with contributors, grow relationships, and BUIDL code.

What progress has Gitcoin made thus far?

In the short time that Gitcoin has been around, we’ve been super happy with the progress we’ve made. At present time, we have approximately 7000 accounts and 350 projects.All of this user activity has amounted to over $145K transacted via bounties on the Gitcoin platform.The average amount of time it takes for a bounty to get started is ~8 hours with these bounties being turned around in a median 5.6 days. After start of work, we have about a 91% bounty completion rate.

One of our most exciting statistics that continues to grow is how many bounty hunters have been hired via Gitcoin. To date, we’ve had 11 people hired to full-time positions after working on bounties with open source projects.For more stats, feel free to check out our results page.https://gitcoin.co/results

What cool stuff have we built?

In conjunction with main goal of growing open source, we want to make sure that we are continually supporting growth of the Ethereum ecosystem (itself an open source project). We’ve created some cool features that we hope are useful to both the Gitcoin community and Ethereum ecosystem as a whole.

• We released the Gitcoin iOS app. The app allows you to stay up to date with all things open source on-the-go.
• We added a Gitcoin Avatar. Avatars allow for further personalization of Gitcoin accounts. Make yours today!
• Gas pricing is a vital component of DApp operation. That is exactly why Kevin Owocki created the Gas History visualization tool. Now you can assess gas costs and it’s history simply, and in one place.

• As we’ve said in the past, hiring is broken. We know that many open source projects use Gitcoin as a valuable hiring signal. Now, it’s even simpler to hire via Gitcoin. Funders can now add links to job descriptions right on a bounty. This is an easy way to show developers that you’re hiring and to attract the job-seeking talent that you’re looking for.

Who are we partnered with?

• The Stable Fund and MakerDAO to fund bounties on Gitcoin via the DAI stablecoin
• ConsenSys, ECF — Ethereum Community Fund, and the Ethereum Foundation to both fund bounties and help grow the Ethereum ecosystem

What has Gitcoin helped #BUIDL and how?

• Market Protocol — Cross-chain asset exchange
• Augur — Decentralized oracle and prediction market

• Balance — Open source financial system
• uPort — Self-sovereign identity on Ethereum
• Ethereum Foundation — Infrastructure for the decentralized future

…and many more. Check out the full list on the Gitcoin Issue Explorer!

What’s next?

All we’ve done, and will continue to do, is in pursuit of an fully open source ecosystem.

CodeFund

CodeFund is a platform that matches open source software developers to advertisers who want to reach their audience. Using CodeFund, developers can monetize their work in open source and sustain their ability to focus on the project full time.

Developer Grants

Soon, developers will be able to receive direct sponsorship from the community! Powered by StakeTree’s smart contracts, developers can receive recurring funding in any ETH or ERC20 token on a monthly or weekly basis.

Managed Bounties

We’ve got a new concept called ‘Managed Bounties’ in the pipeline where we will manage all the Gitcoin bounty-ing for open source platforms! No need to worry about that backlog of issues on your Github repo. We’ll tear through them, post them to Gitcoin, and make sure they get completed in reasonable time.