The Stellar Development Foundation loves open source, and here at the podcast we have a special affinity for open source funding, which allows people to get paid for creating the world's most essential and accessible tooling. You can understand our excitement then when we ran across Kevin Owocki and his Gitcoin project. Kevin has spent a lot of time and effort thinking about — and building solutions for — the problems raised by open source funding as well as remote community development. Listen to learn how Gitcoin helps people get paid to work on free software.
The Stellar Development Foundation loves open source, and here at the podcast we have a special affinity for open source funding, which allows people to get paid for creating the world's most essential and accessible tooling. You can understand our excitement then when we ran across Kevin Owocki and his Gitcoin project. Kevin has spent a lot of time and effort thinking about — and building solutions for — the problems raised by open source funding as well as remote community development. Listen to learn how Gitcoin helps people get paid to work on free software.
Kevin (00:00):
I think that it's about building software that celebrates the unique things about us all and then building software that rewards value created with value captured.
Tyler (00:24):
Hello, Stellar community. Welcome to the Stellar podcast. Before we get into the interview, I'd like to highlight a couple pieces of really important news in the ecosystem. One is the Stellar community fund is in its final round of voting. So be sure and head over to stellarcommunity.fund and vote to allocate those 3 million lumens across our eight finalists.
Tyler (00:45):
The second piece would be Protocol 13, be sure and check out Protocol 13. We'll put some links in the show notes. It's a phenomenal update coming to Stellar. The official production vote will happen next month, but it's important to understand and see the updates and changes that are happening there and to contribute where you're able to. Okay, let's get into it.
Tyler (01:12):
Today. I have a very special guest on the line, Kevin Owocki. He's the founder of Gitcoin, which we're in the middle of a hackathon with them. So make sure if you haven't to check that out. We thought we'd have him here on the show, he actually aligns very closely with the work that Colton and I are interested in. So we thought we'd have him on the show to talk about the things that he finds fascinating and fantastic about development in the open source communities in engineering. So Kevin, thanks so much for jumping on. Let's start with a little bit of background history. How did you end up at Gitcoin?
Kevin (01:52):
Hey Tyler, thanks so much for having me. So Gitcoin is a place where you can get coins, if you're a software developer. It's a developer network that has driven about four and a half million dollars to open source software developers. And I started in my basement back in 2017. So it took some of the money that I made in the bull market of 2017, reinvested it in creating a brand oriented around the mission of growing open source.
Kevin (02:22):
And so the idea there is that open source software provides billions of dollars of economic value to the world. And there was no mechanism through which software developers could really capture that value and pay their mortgage just by working on open source. So, that was the conception of Gitcoin. And we since then have gotten an investment from Joe Lubin and that really took Gitcoin from the place in which it was just me and my friends using Gitcoin to incentivize our work to top tier projects like Truffle and MetaMask and the Ethereum Foundation and Stellar using Gitcoin.
Kevin (02:59):
Along the way, I've been involved in everything from engineering to product, to community development, to actually building the business. So wearing a lot of hats as the first engineer at Gitcoin, and super excited to be working with Stellar on this hackathon.
Tyler (03:16):
Yeah, it's been fantastic just getting more familiar with the platform that you guys have. Funding is something that's very interesting to me and extremely important for early stage development as you kind of kickstart a network. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that since that's the incentive for starting Gitcoin. At stellar, we have a Stellar community fund, which every three months we hand out 3 million lumens to eight different projects through a kind of popular voting mechanism, but it can be really challenging for projects that win or that maybe are struggling to answer the question, "How do I make money off of what I'm building? Do I need to have a really solid business model and pitch to investors? Because just trying to get funds from my users, I only have 10 of them, so how am I supposed to leverage the users that I have? When is it time to ask for money versus it's time to just build something and really prove its value first?"
Tyler (04:14):
So from your perspective, what's that process from kind of an idea in my head for something that's valuable and this kind of thought that exists right now in programming, which is you should never charge money for the work that you do. Everything should be free and open source. Maybe there's some misconceptions in there and you can help us clear those up.
Kevin (04:37):
Yeah, for sure. Well, one of the things that I've been super passionate about during my 12, 13 year career as a software engineer is that everything that I've ever built has been using open source software. When I start a new startup, I don't build my own web server or my own database server. I use Postgres and Nginx for those things. And open source has provided tremendous value to me. And I think the number is $400 billion per year in economic value created by open source software. And the problem was that there was no business model for open source that is scalable and fits all projects that are providing value.
Kevin (05:16):
And one of the insights that I had when we started to Gitcoin was that now we're going to have this open source financial system. And so in the course of building the open source financial system is going to be billions of dollars of capital that would have gone in the old financial system to some back office on Wall Street. And it's now going to open source software.
Kevin (05:36):
So what if we could build the rails to help people who are creating value in open source, actually able to capture that value? And so I think that that's sort of one of the North stars that we're pursuing and Gitcoin. With respect to individual projects that are providing value to the world, I think that software is sort of unique in that it has a fixed cost of actually developing the software, but then there's zero marginal cost of actually maintaining the software, after the software has been created. Millions of people can derive value for almost the same cost as those first 10 users that you talked about.
Kevin (06:21):
And so one of the things that we're trying to do is provide value early during the time the software development package is actually being created so that you can actually have an incentive to create a software package that is providing value back into the world.
Kevin (06:42):
But I've been the maintainer on about 10, 15 different projects. And the process for me has been a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what the community actually needs and where I can provide value, and Gitcoin is the results. Gitcoin is open source itself. Gitcoin is the result of years of ideation and iteration for me in actually figuring out how to create value and then worrying about capturing value is I think something that you can do after you figure out how to create value. So there's no full proof process right now, but Gitcoin's building a suite of tools that can hopefully help guide people along the way.
Tyler (07:19):
That's awesome. Can you maybe talk a little bit about those tools and how so if you've really highlighted the problem and that North star that you're looking at, can you maybe describe some of the tooling and features and functionalities that Gitcoin has or is working towards to get you there?
Kevin (07:41):
Yeah, thanks. So Gitcoin is a double sided marketplace that connects coders to the people who want to fund their work in open source software. And it connects people who have money to coders that can work on their software. So double sided marketplace, and there's multiple ways that we connect people to the people who can fund them.
Kevin (08:03):
The first one it's the one that we launched with in 2017 is bounties. So the idea here is that you write up a feature request or a bug report for something that you want done, and then Gitcoin, by virtue of having thousands of software engineers on it, will find the right software engineer, help you find the right software engineer to work on that issue. And the idea is that once the software engineer fixes the bug or develops the feature, then they get paid out the tokens that have been put on the bounty.
Kevin (08:36):
So basically it's kind of a, "I will give you X tokens if you do Y for me." And it's a great way of having an on demand workforce if you're a coder to work on your ecosystem, to work on your software engineering issues. And one of the things that we've really seen it be really successful with respect to building out teams, is that it's a great way to try before you buy hire with software engineers. So as opposed to meeting someone, doing a bunch of interviews and then going full time, then bounties are a really great way to just do a small piece of scope together, maybe a $500, $1,000 project. And if both parties are really into the relationship then you can walk off into the sunset together and work together full time from there. So that's bounties, that's the first product that we launched with.
Kevin (09:24):
The other product that I'd love to tell your listeners about, and it's become a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem, according to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is called Gitcoin grants. And basically it's sort of just a different way of connecting those two sides of the market, connecting coders to the people who are going to fund them. And basically what it is is it's like a crypto Patreon. So you can post a grant for the great work that you're already doing in open source software, say you're building a project that supports the Stellar ecosystem in some way. It's a crowdfunding project that allows you to raise money from people who derive value from your work. So as opposed to bounties where you specify, I will give you X tokens for Y, with Gitcoin grants, you say, "I am doing Y and I would like to raise X," it's kind of like the reverse. And Gitcoin grants has issued what was $2 million in rewards to the Ethereum ecosystem and is becoming a significant pillar of how the Ethereum ecosystem works.
Kevin (10:29):
And one of the things that we've been doing in order to support that is we have a matching fund that we deploy every quarter on Gitcoin grants. We've just got done our fifth matching fund for Gitcoin grants, it was worth $250K and the payments went out in April, 2020. The basic idea is that every contribution to a Gitcoin grant during that matching time period is going to be matched with a contribution from the matching fund. But the gimmick is that we're not matching it one to one, we're matching based off of the number of contributors instead of the amount raised. And so the exciting thing about this is that it optimizes for projects that are more broadly supported in a democratic sense, not what the whales and the ecosystem want to see. And so the way this works tangibly is that if grant A raises $100 from one contributor and grant B raises $100 from 10 contributors, so $10 each across 10 contributors, then grant B will receive way more of the matching funds because they have more contributors that are supporting their project.
Kevin (11:41):
And so if you want to support public goods, if you want to support open source software that a broad swath of the population cares about, then Gitcoin grants is a really great way to do that. And as opposed to a centralized grant administration team, which can only process, let's say 10 to 20 grant applications per month, Gitcoin grants can process hundreds of grant applications per month because it's your community of peers that is deciding which projects are actually going to get funding. So it pushes power to the edges, to the actual community to figure out what's providing value. And that's been a killer app for the Ethereum ecosystem, and it's been a killer way to grow open source.
Kevin (12:24):
So I think to stick the landing on answering your question, there are multiple ways to support open source software developers that we support both bounties and grants, and a few other things that are delivering a $5 million of value to open source software developers so far. And we're doing about $500K per month across this entire product suite. So super proud that we're supporting the Ethereum ecosystem and increasingly other crypto ecosystems. And there's people who are actually making a living off of Gitcoin these days. And that's really what we want. We want you to be able to quit your job and be able to pay your mortgage by working on open source.
Tyler (13:02):
That's awesome. That's so cool. Can you talk a little bit about the internals of both of these mechanisms? Is it smart contract escrow accounts? How do you get the money? How do you verify that work's been done? Who owns those types of things? Just out of raw curiosity, on my part.
Kevin (13:27):
Yeah. So we've got a smart contract in the Ethereum ecosystem called standard bounties. It is a standard for posting bounties. And basically the way that works is that when you post a bounty, you will stake a certain amount of tokens on the blockchain, and that will be escrowed in the smart contract. And then basically people can start work on that bounty, and then they can submit their work to attest that they've completed the bounty.
Kevin (13:53):
And one of the cool things about this is that Gitcoin never has access to those funds. So as opposed to Upwork, where they have a separate legal entity called Upwork Escrow, LLC, that administers the funds in between, while they're in the escrow period, Gitcoin, never has access to those funds, which I think is one of the fundamental innovations that the blockchain has enabled. And basically funders are able to decide whether or not a pull request meets their specifications or not.
Kevin (14:23):
And one of the things that you do every time you participate in a Gitcoin bouncy is that you stake your reputation on the platform. So we've got profiles and we've got star ratings, and we've got a tight feedback loop in between the two sides of the marketplace. And so that's one of the reasons why 80% of bounties that are posted to the Gitcoin network are completed successfully and the other 20% are canceled. We do have 0.5% of them that ended up disputed and escalated to us. But usually by the time it's escalated to us, we're able to find an amicable resolution. So that's the basic architecture of bounties. Let me know if you have any questions and I could tell you more about the grants architecture too, if you're interested in that.
Tyler (15:08):
Yeah. I'd love to hear more about the grants, particularly because it's not a single entity. The system you just mentioned is fantastic, especially, I think it's required that you have some sort of star rating system, the Airbnb model. But how does that work once you have individual members that are contributing to a pool, essentially, at least is my understanding, how does that work when it comes to fulfillment?
Kevin (15:33):
Yeah, for sure. So all of the grants on Gitcoin, when you contribute to them, it goes directly to the person who owns that grant. Gitcoin never touches those funds unless you've given optional donation to Gitcoin. And that's a really cool innovation of blockchain is that we don't have to ask her the funds again. And so basically what we do is that when you contribute to a grant on Gitcoin, we will look at that transaction ID and we have a backend process that will follow that, that contribution happened to that grant. And then basically when that transaction clears and those tokens are transferred, then we will increment a counter in our database and we will calculate an updated matching amount for that grant.
Kevin (16:20):
And so basically at the end of the grant fund, we will be administering... We administered 600 payments of $250K to participants in the Ethereum ecosystem in the week after that Gitcoin grants round ended. And we're using this matching formula called quadratic matching, which is quite math heavy, but basically is a really great way of allocating funds in a democratic way. So the grants architecture is peer to peer with the exception of the matching fund, which for now Gitcoin administers, but in the future, we'll have a trustless architecture for managing that.
Tyler (17:03):
Yeah, that's so cool. I think that's really interesting that the matching part of that really does knock it out of the park as an incentive for people that are maybe giving lower dollar amounts, but they really want to see this thing succeed. It's like, "I can multiply my funds if I give to this grant." That's really cool.
Kevin (17:22):
Yeah. Actually, in order to articulate that point, I just want to briefly mention that when we first started Gitcoin grants, we did it without quadratic funding and approximately zero people used it. Probably 10 people contributed in that first month. And so what we found is that when you display in the UI, "Contribute $1 and this project will get $100," then that really gets people to open up their wallets, or I guess on the blockchain sign their transactions. And the cool thing is that just by voting with your dollars, we're able to really help these grant owners raise on the order of 10 or $20,000 in the most successful cases. And it's because of the psychological incentives of having that matching fund that we're able to do that.
Tyler (18:12):
That matching fund, where does that come from? Do you say that comes from Gitcoin for now?
Kevin (18:18):
Yeah, so basically it comes from people who are trying to build out their ecosystem. So we work with Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum foundation, in order to help them to augment their grant giving that they do in building out the Ethereum ecosystem. And increasingly we're talking to other crypto ecosystems about helping them grow their ecosystem. If you're not careful, Tyler, I might pitch you on helping you grow the Stellar ecosystem.
Tyler (18:47):
Yeah.
Kevin (18:48):
And the whole idea is that this is a more scalable, more decentralized way to grow an ecosystem. And so basically that's the incentive that people have to contribute to the matching pool, they want to grow an ecosystem.
Tyler (19:03):
That's interesting, because my next question, we have this funding mechanism, the Stellar community fund, where the community votes, and they vote to split up essentially the foundation money that we've allocated to this fund. So that would be your matching grant, but we don't require voters to contribute any of their own funds. What are some of the downsides of doing that? And why might we choose to move into a system where you have to put a little more skin in the game when voting, particularly if your ecosystem is not the Ethereum ecosystem where we're smaller than that?
Kevin (19:41):
Yeah, for sure. So, I think that keeping it simple to start is a really good thing. And I think that there's no downside really to having a centralized grant pool that's administered by a set amount of people when you're just starting out. And then I think that voting architecture is a great way to extend that. What we've seen with Gitcoin and the Ethereum ecosystem is that it provides a signal back to the Ethereum ecosystem about what their community cares about. And it's not just a signal of giving an upvote, it's actually voting with your dollars. So you know that the community actually cares about it because they're taking out their own wallet and giving money. So it's a stronger signal than it would be if you were just using likes or upvotes or something.
Kevin (20:34):
It helps you split the bill with your community. So basically the idea is that Gitcoin grants, the most recent round we did was $475K given out to the Ethereum ecosystem, and the Ethereum foundation only funded half of that. So basically kind of doubles your money when it's building ecosystem. And it was also a marketing activation point for the Ethereum ecosystem. Gitcoin grants is kind of wall to wall during the two week matching funds that we do because everyone wants to get their peers to contribute to the grants. And so you'll see on Twitter that there are lots of people in the Ethereum ecosystem marketing their projects and helping get the word out about their projects.
Kevin (21:18):
We had this one grant, Metagame, that raised $10K, but they told us that the most valuable thing that they got was that they doubled their user base during the grants round. So it's a marketing activation point for ecosystem. And I think the thing that, as a decentralist myself, that I'm most excited about is that it pushes power to the edges of your community. So if you don't get funded, it's not because there's some centralized grant administrator that doesn't respect your work. It's because you can't convince your peers that your work is valuable. And to me, that's a really important thing to drink the Koolaid of the decentralization movement.
Tyler (21:55):
Yeah. That's interesting. And I agree 100%. My history more in on the business side of things is you can have 1,000, 10,000 users, but if they're not paying you anything, do you really have something that's all that valuable? Because money speaks way louder than just an up vote. Anybody will say something's cool, but when it comes time to take your wallet out, that's when you really realize or come to terms with, is this something that's actually valuable or is it just noise?
Tyler (22:24):
So I agree with you 100% on that. And maybe you can speak a little bit to having spent so much time in the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as outside doing different development in open source and building community. Can you maybe speak to just some of the strategies, they're probably obvious things, but how do you grow a developer community? How do you grow a community around some of those sort of ideas? Particularly when it's wicked technical or it can be, and the people who are closest to it are so technical.
Kevin (23:01):
Yeah. That's a great question. And I feel like... I sent this tweet the other day that it was like, "How to build your developer community with this one weird trick," because I was kind of making fun of clickbait style headlights. But the truth is that you build a developer community by providing something that's valuable. There's really no way around the hard work of creating something that's going to provide value to use. There's no trick other than doing the work of doing that. I think I got my first Stellar tokens back in... It was when I was living in New York, which I want to say was 2013 or something like that. So I've been following your guys' projects, and I think it's super interesting what y'all are up to.
Kevin (23:46):
One of the things that I've found super useful for Gitcoin is that we're oriented around this mission of growing and sustaining open source, providing economic opportunities to software developers. And for a target audience, that's a pretty viscerally important thing. And so starting with why I think is really important before you get to the what, and if you listen to the intro to this podcast, I talked about our mission before I talked about any of our products. And so what's your reason for being? What do you deeply value? And what do you stand for, for me, is where I start.
Kevin (24:25):
After you've established that, articulated that, found people who are like minded with you, then you're really getting into execution territory. And I think of execution, not only as building a great product, but it's looking people in the eye, it's building relationships with people who are in your community. I'm a student of Andrew Hyde, who's a community organizer out here in the Boulder, Colorado space. And we have this event called Boulder Startup Week that we do every May in which we'll basically do a one week celebration of entrepreneurship and community in Colorado. And he taught me when I was doing a track organization, I started to greet every person who comes to the door to shake their hands, to make them feel welcome in your space and to let them know why you're here. What motivates you about community? And I'm not an active Boulder Startup Week organizer anymore, but I try to take those same principles to building the community at Gitcoin.
Kevin (25:24):
We've got 30,000 software developers in our ecosystem. So I can't shake everyone's hand, especially because we're all social distancing these days. Share a status update when you join Gitcoin and people will welcome you. People will actually send you a microtip if you just say hi to them on Gitcoin as a way of showing appreciation for each other. And I think that we really risk when we go online losing that human element of what it's like to sort of celebrate our uniqueness and to look each other in the eye. And I really hope that the next generation of social networks will be better than the web 2.0 social networks that we have out there. And I think that blockchain can play a big part of that.
Kevin (26:08):
So I know I'm not directly answering your question, but there was a great book called The Art of Community that I read, which is about open source communities in it, and I would recommend that your readers, if they're in a community management role, check out The Art of Community. It's available on Amazon, I think for $25. And that's something that I continually find myself referencing when I'm building Gitcoin's community.
Tyler (26:28):
Yeah. That's such good advice and very helpful. So maybe to bring it into just some more practical things that you're doing at Gitcoin, you mentioned microtipping. So, there's that. What other things are you doing practically to make good on those things that you're recognizing in the books you read or communities out there that you really appreciate? How are you implementing some of those things into a strictly software, and now very remote and isolated, community? How is Gitcoin not dying right now?
Kevin (27:03):
Yeah. So, basically, I think that it's about building software that celebrates the unique things about us all, and then building software that rewards value created with value captured. So, I'll start with the first thing. When you sign up to Gitcoin, you'll notice that we have a profile system that allows you to customize an avatar and basically represent the digital version of yourself, whether you're black, white, purple, and regardless of gender, part of the world that you're in, celebrating those unique things about yourself. So creating a profile that sort of represents your digital avatar, who you want to be in the world is something that we've put substantial amount of effort in, in order to provide value to users right off the bat.
Kevin (27:57):
We also have this non-fungible token that we launched called Gitcoin kudos. And the idea is that it's like a digital Hallmark card. So as opposed to finishing a bounty with someone and just getting a bunch of tokens for completing that work, wouldn't it be nice if you got a personalized note from the funder that says, "Hey, you did a really great job on this. And here's a kudos that you can display on your profile so that other people can see how much I appreciate the work that you did." And so this is one of the first things that we watched after we did the bounty network, is this non-fungible token called Gitcoin kudos. And basically the idea there is that it's a credential that shows that someone really appreciates you. And it really shifts the motivations back from extrinsic, "I'm going to earn these tokens," to intrinsic such that, "Oh, I really appreciate this person."
Kevin (28:48):
And I think that that's something that we do a really great job of when we're in person with someone, treating our coworkers as actual humans. So those are kind of the little details that you'll see on the Gitcoin network. And Tyler, if you give me your Gitcoin username, I'll send you a kudos for running a really great podcast interview with me. And then the rest of it just comes down to making sure that people are actually paid for the work that they're doing and rewarded for the work that they're doing in open source, which sounds obvious. But doing that at scale with software is something we've put considerable effort into, and we don't always get it right, but we have delivered over $4.5 million worth of value to open source software developers. And my hope is that eventually we're going to have a generation of software developers who can just work for open source software, work for the open internet. And that's really the North star that we're shooting for.
Tyler (29:41):
Yeah, that's cool. That's amazing. I think those are very tangible. It makes me want to just go sign up and start building open source software so I can get kudos. I don't even care about the payments.
Kevin (29:51):
I will send you a kudos after this if I can find your profile.
Tyler (29:57):
My last question, sort of a follow up on that specific to Stellar's community, we don't have... Well, maybe I'm wrong in defining in my narrow views of what a product is, but we don't have a website, a product, a landing page where you go and log in and have an account. We spend time on Keybase and maybe Slack or wherever our communities are talking to each other. And then we do have a voting mechanism site for the Stellar community fund, but that's also a little bit focused on just the developer ecosystem, maybe not the wider user ecosystem. And then you've got the Reddit side. So when you don't necessarily have a login system or a central hub where people have some sort of digital self associated with your product, is there still a way? Do you need to build some sort of product where there can be some identity involved there? Or is there a way to achieve some of the same objectives that you're talking about in other maybe less tangible, pixels on a screen way?
Kevin (31:00):
Yeah. I think that the tools that you spoke about are important ones. Twitter and Reddit are the web 2.0 social networks that I think that are providing a really good... Well, not really good, but that's where the communities are right now. And one of my theories is that we can provide better social networks with blockchain technology because now instead of rewarding people with likes and upvotes... Likes and upvotes are the ultimate shitcoin because they have no supply cap. You can just give out as many as you want.
Kevin (31:36):
And so with blockchain technology, you can actually reward people with actual tangible value. And so my theory is that we're going to see a proliferation of new web 3.0 social networks that actually leverage blockchain to create more trust. In our local communities, we've got trust anchors of having your family there and having gone to school in your local community. And so as the world moves remote, what are the trust anchor is in a remote first world?
Kevin (32:04):
I know that the answer to your question that I've given so far is somewhat theoretical. And I think that's a valid criticism of what I'm saying. And so one of the things that I'm trying to do with Gitcoin is that we're launching this product called Gitcoin tribes, which is basically a one stop shop to find your tribe, your software developer tribe. And we're going to have web 3.0 native paradigms built into Gitcoin tribes. And so, one tangible example of what we're doing there is that quadratic funding formula that I told you about for Gitcoin grants, we run quarterly matching rounds with quadratic funding in the Gitcoin grants products, but now we're starting to do weekly mini quadratic funding rounds on the Gitcoin social network.
Kevin (32:49):
And so basically what that means is that basically if you post something that someone really likes, they can send you a 20 cent micro tip, which wouldn't be meaningful except for quadratic funding, because there's now $200 that is being allocated to the community based off of who's microtipping who. So you can send 25 cents and that person will earn $5 because their post provided value. And so it's these mechanism designs that have so far only really been theories. We're actually putting them into practice at Gitcoin, and I want to build a better social network, better online community using blockchain technology.
Kevin (33:26):
And so that's the goal, but I think that the topic of how do we get communities, the gathering places, is probably the subject of a whole other podcast. I hope you'll have me back and we can nerd out on that another time. But it's been awesome to be on this podcast. Like I said, I got my first Stellar tokens back in, I think it was 2013. It's been a while and I still hold them. So I'm pretty excited to be working with you guys on a professional basis now.
Tyler (33:55):
Yeah, very cool. We're super excited to be a part of the hackathon and start looking at more of these kinds of things, particularly just as we grow and really identify how do we grow our community well, and not just get more developers, but like you said, add that human aspect to grow a healthy, vibrant community, and not just focus on the technical aspects because the technical aspects are incredibly important. If you have a garbage service, it doesn't matter how much hype you give it. It's a garbage service. But if you have something that's really good, that does solve problems, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to go anywhere. You have to market it well, you have to get people excited about the right things and treat the people who are your adopters with respect and give them the help they need to guide them along and all these things that we're really starting to focus on now.
Tyler (34:45):
So it's great to hear from you, to learn from you from the success that you've had at Gitcoin. Very excited to be partnering a bit with you in the hackathon, and look forward to seeing more products come out of Gitcoin later. And yeah, I would love to have you back on to talk about social networks 3.0, that would be very interesting because I've thought a lot about the same things, even as far as like, "Is there a plugin or something that you can attach to some of these things where people do have to like with money?" But the big piece that's missing is what you've found with the quadratic funding. 20 cents just isn't worth it. And it's almost people know that it's not worth it. So why would I give it? But if that has a potential to be something more, then you've really started to change the game. So, that's really interesting to me.
Kevin (35:37):
Yeah. The hope is to go beyond just the theory of why web 3.0 social networks could be better and actually do it in practice. And so that's the goal. It seems like you and I might be philosophically aligned here. I think that the podcast is wrapping down now. But I think that there's a lot of people interested in this topic of how do we create a global web scale community that's as good as a local community. And I believe strongly that with programmable money and mechanism design that's something we're going to be able to do. So maybe we'll end it there and we can expand, pinch and zoom on that.
Tyler (36:14):
Part two.
Kevin (36:14):
Exactly. Yeah.
Tyler (36:17):
All right. Super. Well, thanks so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. And I'll be reaching back out later to, to cover this stuff again.
Kevin (36:24):
Okay. This was fun. Thanks for having me.
Tyler (36:25):
Yeah, absolutely. You have a great rest of your day.
Kevin (36:28):
You too.
Tyler (36:35):
For more information about Stellar and the future of decentralized finance, visit stellar.org. And get involved in the discussion on one of our active communities on Keybase at stellar.public or Stellar stock exchange. Until next time, I'm your host, Tyler van der Hoeven. Catch y'all later.