Adam Stacoviak: Oh, yes… Well, they had to. They were getting no funding. They had to find their own way to IPO, so they were like “ICO. Let’s do this.”

Feross Aboukhadijeh: I totally agree with what you’re saying, Jerod. I feel like the whole crypto space has been a little disappointing. There was like all this really cool decentralization work happening before the ICO craze started; there was – I’m gonna shout out some of my friends here, but I feel like the Dat Project, Mathias Buus, Chris and Kelby, and Paul Frazee, and all the people building that… The Secure Scuttlebutt project, with Dominic Tarr, and a whole cool community there… And then I’ll throw WebTorrent in there, too; I thought it was pretty cool.

So basically, there was all this stuff that was actually working, right? It worked, it actually did what it said it was supposed to do, it worked. It had almost no – or literally no financial backing behind it, and yet, we shipped stuff that worked. And then this whole crypto thing kind of took the air out of the room, and everybody started throwing money at it, and for several years I kept wondering “Okay, when is this stuff gonna actually start to work, and do what it says it’s supposed to do?” And it took a really long time for that to start materializing.

And then now, if you kind of look at “Okay, what has all this accomplished?” I mean, there’s definitely real stuff happening, and I don’t want to be totally cynical about it… There’s definitely good people doing real computer science, and like making new stuff. But overall, I kind of just feel like the whole thing is so self-referential. If you ask people “Okay, what does your project do? What does this company do? What does this product do?”, it’s always like “Oh, well it connects this chain to this other chain.” And then it’s like “Okay, cool, that seems useful”, but then you go and ask those two chains, “Okay, what do you guys do?” and then it’s like “Well, we connect this thing to this other thing.” And it’s like, at what point does it terminate with actually doing something useful, right? It’s just a little bit too self-referential and too circular, and there’s only a couple of use cases that I can think of that are actually real.

I don’t know, it’s just – my hope for this whole thing is that it ends up actually doing useful things for real people at some point. That’s the real letdown for me so far.

Gerhard Lazu: So January 25th, 26th is when we switched the assets served directly from S3, from AWS S3 on, and since, a couple of interesting things happened. First of all, our fav icons, favicon.ico, I-C-O, however you want to to pronounce it, we have seen elevated 404 responses for those. But I think you were saying, Jerod, that’s like a default behavior for some browsers. And even though we tell where to find the icon, they don’t look for it there. Is that right?

Adam Stacoviak: That’s right, I just tell you. Well, there was an episode… I think it was called “ICO or death”, or something like that… I have to look it up. But they were gonna ICO, because they saw – it was a long story short; I shouldn’t even go into this, but I’m gonna have to, really quickly. I’ll keep it short. They accidentally gave away credits on their network, and outside of their control, they got into the open market… And they couldn’t get those credits back because they had given them away, and they traded hands a few different times, and when they finally caught up with it, the credits were worth millions of dollars. And so, like any good HBO show on current trends and technology, they had to go the route of essentially finding out “How could ICOs fit into this world?”

[01:39:59.16] The episode was called “Initial coin offering.” So they just dove into it, basically. They had some value out there. It’s interesting how you can be fueled by your most loyal fans, versus simply the incumbents of venture capital. Not that those are bad people by any means, or [01:40:17.17] better than the other; it’s just a new avenue. It’s a new reduction in the barrier to entry.

Jerod Santo: Another thing that’s happening is that there’s more opportunities now, in addition to the speculation, because there’s now more use cases. We’re also in a bull run for cryptocurrencies, so that’s gonna bring in more people, of course… But back when Ethereum first launched, you had the DAO use case, the ICO, so you had the crowd investment use case… There really wasn’t much else you could do with these things besides speculate. And then the DeFi thing started to happen - decentralized finance - and I think there’s a lot of snake oil in that whole deal, but maybe it’s just unregulated markets; I don’t know, there’s some features there for lending stuff that’s cool, maybe… And then what happened recently, in addition to the stuff you all are talking about, is NFTs really have become this interesting, wild, new use case for these decentralized networks… And a lot of people wanna mint NFTs and don’t know how to… So what do they do? They hire somebody who can do that for them.

So there’s lots of opportunities to get involved in and around building auction houses, and minting platforms… So this is really brand new. I mean, 2020, 2021… I’m not sure how long it’s been going, but the NFT thing is very real. Now, maybe it’s just a fad, but it seems like a legitimate use case that’s bringing lots of people to the table.

Nick Reese: Yeah, so I’ve only been writing meaningful code for like three years, and it’s kind of funny, because I never really identified as being a developer/coder anything like that prior to this. I’ve built several ICO companies and startups and had several exits… Essentially, I have to have something to do with my time, and I find building out useful websites for consumers is kind of where I spend that. I built a static site generator for fun, and it kind of grew into something I decided to open source and that has meaningful usage in the world. It’s kind of strange, because I’ve never had my code critiqued; it works, that’s what I know… And it feels a little strange to imagine people picking through my code and saying “Oh, this could be more efficient” or whatnot, but everyone has some of that.

Matthew Hodgson: Yeah, I mean… When we set up New Vector it was 2017, and it was right at the peak of the ICO frenzy, and an awful lot of people were saying “Oh my god, you’ve actually got a working decentralized product. If you put a token in that, you can be gazillionaires.” And we did consider it, honestly, quite seriously; in fact, I even sat down with the team at one point and said “Guys, we’re not doing very well at finding seed funding for New Vector. We’re gonna do an ICO”, and everybody kind of head-desked and looked unsuitably cautious and worried about it. I’m glad we didn’t, honestly, for many reasons… But it’s nice honestly to do it the old-fashioned way, with good old-fashioned customers, and avoid Matrix ever being a kind of pay per play thing where people are speculating or gaming it to try to get more of the magic beans.

Eric Holscher: [20:10] You’re tying yourself – we definitely view advertising as a powerful tool. And the people we work with – we’re not advertising some random ICO, or whatever. We have pretty high standards for…

Jerod Santo: And that’s why I think the ICO as a novel instrument for funding bubbled, because it was so easy to feign competency; you were selling ideas, so all you needed was a white paper to get investment… And there’s your idea.

Jerod Santo: I love the way that you described Manyverse on the homepage, when you say “Free forever.” You have this pyramid or triangle of things that it doesn’t have, which is a very interesting way of pitching something. “No ads. No paywall. No data centers. No cloud. No cookies. No company. No investors. No token. No ICO.” I’ll run out of breath saying all the things this doesn’t have. I think it gets more interesting… “No tracking. No spying. No analytics.”

Jerod Santo: Gotcha. So you sold almost immediately after the ICO.

Joseph Jacks: Right. I think that’s an interesting way of looking at it. All of those things – not to be pedantic, but I think all those things probably matter a lot in any conversation with either going and doing something in the cryptocurrency blockchain world, or as a venture capital-oriented thing, or just as a general startup raising money, whether it’s open source or not… I think for us, we fundamentally take a very technical approach, and definitely look at the code and authentic open source nature of a given company and team and project, and then sort of reason up from there. So I’d definitely say the distinction, at least for whitepaper to ICO reasoning - it’s different, for sure. But yeah, that’s definitely an interesting way of looking at it.

Pia Mancini: And then for us, raising money was a conversation. A lot of backwards and forwards about how much we wanted to raise, and if we wanted to raise, and how we could do these and support ourselves in a different way, and we played with the idea of doing an ICO for a very long time, for sort of like an Open Collective coin, we could do a crowdsale…

Taking money from investors wasn’t our default mode; it wasn’t just the thing that everyone does so we went ahead and did it. It was a process that we suffered through, from a decision perspective… And we were very lucky in that… And I guess it also has to do with who we are and how we think of ourselves, but the investors that we have are very much aligned with what we do and the way we do things. And we were also very careful to make sure that we filled the round with as many entrepreneurs and founders as possible. For us, that was also very important.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, I’m not sure I would trust Google with – I mean… I’m not sure I would trust Google with GitHub. If that was the headline, I’d be like “Oh, my gosh…” Microsoft, because they have been such an underdog, they’ve been earning it. As we’ve said with Julia White, they brought the code, they earned it, they came to the community, embraced it… They did things the right way, they played by the rules, in a lot of cases; not if you ask Zed Shaw - that conversation is gonna air soon… But that was after this, otherwise it would have been a different conversation, because there were some things that happened in that conversation. Had this happened, we would have been able to key into it a bit more, but…

You know, I think Microsoft, because they’ve been trying to earn it, to me is the best suitor of this, if there had to be one. If they couldn’t go through an IPO, or even an ICO, which both of those are lengthy processes, risky processes… You don’t know at your IPO if people are gonna pay your stock price; that’s not a sure win. It’s a long road, it’s a different kind of business; it’s not self or even VC-owned anymore now… It’s a way different regulated company.

[28:28] If you think about that - Chris and the rest of the leadership team may have actually protected GitHub from the chains that would have been forced on it by IPO-ing or going public… Which could be a different perspective maybe no one’s considering, like “What would GitHub be or how would it have to change if it went public?”

Kevin Owocki: There’s a synergy there where we place bounties on their issues, and it gets more users to Gitcoin, and it also pushes their repos forward. So that’s how we’re getting it started. But the long-term vision is to sell into projects that are cryptocurrency-based, and to let them see that – you know, if you’re a project that just raised an ICO of 10 million dollars (a token sale of 10 million dollars) and you’ve got some Ether to spend and you’re trying to hire up, Gitcoin is a great way to augment your development team with crowdsourced tasks, and it’s also a great way to recruit, because everyone I know who’s recruiting software engineers likes to do a little test pilot project with them, or at least some sort of technical interview to see what it’s gonna be like working with them. And what better way to figure out what it’s gonna be like to work with someone than to work with someone on something that’s actually on the roadmap, as opposed to something that just approximates what the working conditions would be like.

That’s the short-term view, and then the long-term view is that Gitcoin is building up a suite of tools that are meant to help incentivize work in open source software, and in the future, it will not just be paying money in return for directed action on your repo; we’ll actually allow repo maintainers to raise money using their GitHub repos.

The first step that we’ve taken towards that is by partnering with CodeSponsor.io, and Eric Berry, who is the CEO over there, has done an amazing job of building an ethical advertising network for open source software to allow repo maintainers to make a little bit of money off of the value they’ve created for the world. I think that that project pairs really well with Gitcoin, in that repo maintainers can raise money with CodeSponsor, and then potentially spend that money on pushing their repo forward.

Adam Stacoviak: In this last segment we’re talking about the software as it relates to the community and how we can help out. Bisq is open source, it’s peer-to-peer, decentralized, secure, private and censorship-resistant, which are all things hackers value. We talk about the idea of open source projects funding themselves, the concept of a DAO - a decentralized, autonomous organization, or an ICO (initial coin offering), and Chris breaks down their plan to fund Bisq through the Bisq DAO. This is as bleeding edge as it gets for funding open source. Stay tuned.

Adam Stacoviak: I didn’t read the full thing… The headline seemed to me as if Brave was generating funding through rather than an IPO, an ICO.