Max Howell

Yeah. We incentivize people to try and break T-Rank or Chai. And they found a way to do it by creating more than 200,000 packages on NPM. We're glad they found a way to break it because that meant we could fix it. And that's what the test set is for. But yeah, don't feel good about it. But when you're building new things, there's always unanticipated consequences to that.

A lot of people think I should have seen this coming. I kind of agree with them. I should have seen it coming, but when you're building stuff, you only have so much time.

Yeah, and it won't happen again. We've closed the gap.

What exactly is T? Well, the main purpose of T, at least, you know, what I wanted to accomplish when I came up with the idea, was to use cryptocurrency to fix what we call the Nebraska problem after that famous XKCD comic. You know, the tower blocks representing all of... open source as they get stacked on top of each other.

And those little projects near the bottom that are fragile because the people who maintain them don't have the time or the incentive to do so. And yet it's holding up so much critical infrastructure. So, yeah, it's a cryptocurrency project that uses a unique tokenomics model in order to give open source developers token rewards on a 24 hour basis.

And a lot of the other pieces of it are designed to attract the interests of typical crypto investors or just like normal developers who want to show real support for their open source projects. A key differentiator between us and most ways of supporting open source is that there is no donations in our system. You can buy a token and then stake it against projects.

So both you and the project is gaining from this. There's no gift. It's more like an investment.

So nothing's different. Going into it, I knew that this wouldn't work if we changed anything about how open source already works. Right. You know, you can't charge for open source. You can't make it so you have to, you know, buy token and stake it, even if you can get that token back before you can use things. So it works based on calculating the impact of open source projects.

And then you are creating a yield on top of those projects that then goes to the project maintainers. They then distribute the token however they see fit. But yeah, as a user, nothing's different. And as a maintainer, Nothing's different. I didn't want to change the incentives in open source either. It's still incentivized in exactly the same way.

It's just now you're getting token for doing that rather than before where all you get is reputation or kudos, satisfaction perhaps.

You can stake against specific packages.

Not exactly currently. This is an idea we're playing with. You should be rewarded for seeing up and coming open source, right? That's fun. Right.

It's good for the package because they get more stake yields initially that way. But currently, if something isn't very staked by many people, the yield you get is higher. So there is an incentive to go and find open source that isn't yet popular, but you think will become popular getting there early. Because your yield is also dependent on the impact of that project, the T-rank. of that project.

So initially, the T rank of any new project is going to be close to zero. You don't get any rewards for less than 25. It's necessary to have a cut off, because otherwise people would just create fake open source packages, stick them in the system, and try to gain rewards that way. The T-Rank only grows as you become something other projects use, the dependency tree.

So you do have to convince other projects you're worthy. And that's exactly how open source already works, right? You release something new, it takes time for the community to trust that your package is worthy and use it. So we don't fix the initial uptake problem, but that's the case as it is right now.

Like a percentage back? Mm-hmm. Why would I do that? Because you want to have a yield of 4% or 5%. What does the project maintainer get? They also get a slightly increased yield because they're encouraging people to stake. Now, the T we gain from people staking because it locks the token up, prevents people from suddenly selling it. There's an unstake period.

This is common with crypto projects to prevent rapid fluctuations in token price. Yeah.

So we're going to launch with several major exchanges, still haven't announced them. So most likely you will buy from them. But there will be other ways the token is distributed initially.

There is a distribution of some of the token to the investors of my company, the founders like myself. some advisors as well, but it's a small percentage. We're doing what was considered a fair launch where more than 50% of the token goes to the community.

across the board for it. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have done it with VC. I would have just launched the token myself, taken none myself, and then made it so 100% just goes to open source. But, you know, too late. It's fine. Can't do it. Can't change. Not if I don't want to be sued personally. But it's a very small percentage relatively.