Max Howell

One of the things we're doing is we're launching the token from a completely separate company in Switzerland. It's a non-profit and the long-term goals for that company are to have it be governed and run by the open source community as well. But none of my investors or any of the other people that are related to the company they invested in have any say in how that company runs.

It's very important to me that this is an open source project for the open source community that's governed by the open source community in the long run.

T token, yeah.

Chai is the technology, the oracle that runs the chain.

Yeah, so the way the system works is it's project-based. So we declare that a project will receive X amount of T-token rewards every 24 hours. In order to have that token go to that project's wallet, it's a project wallet, one of the maintainers of the project needs to commit a file, the T-constitution, as we call it, to the GitHub repo or any Git repo. We're not GitHub-specific.

Once our system sees that file, then the rewards start coming in.

The token goes to the project wallet, and then whoever commits that T-constitution can declare any number of people that are considered core contributors to the project. They all have control over that wallet. Now, we haven't made any deliberate decisions on what should happen next. Every project's different, right? Most projects really are just one person, so it's very simple for them.

It gets a lot more complicated when you have large projects like Python or Node or whatever with loads of people. WordPress. And WordPress, exactly. So we're waiting to see what they're going to do about it. But it's on the blockchain. It's an EVM-compatible blockchain. We're using Coinbase's base, which is just Layer 2 on top of Ethereum. And you can write smart contracts to distribute the token.

So that's what I'm hoping I'll see, is the open source community stepping up, writing smart contracts to fairly distribute the token. One easy way to do it is like, here's a list of people, split it equally. A much harder way to do it would be based on pull requests or code contribution. Lines of code. Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. I've already thought this through.

Lines of code is not going to be a great metric for sure. Just incentivize people to make PRs that are longer and longer for no reason.

On that front, I don't think we'll get egg on our face. But who knows? Mud in your eye, egg in your face, yeah. One thing I've certainly learned during this project is there's going to be people that really just don't like it. don't like what you're doing and they're going to be angry no matter what you do. When you're doing things that are genuinely new,

You've got to cross your fingers that you're doing it right and see what the community thinks in the end.

Like, why did you do this? So, yeah, we're going to be quite transparent. As transparent as possible, we're going to be open sourcing most of the... Probably all of it by the end of the year, actually. Even the website, who cares?

But my personal reason for doing this is because three years ago, I was in between full-time work, trying to work on open source once again, and I looked to see if anyone had come up with something that could... pay me to work on it full time for, you know, this time. This time. I've tried things in the past, like Patreon.

Spent half my time marketing myself rather than writing code when I was trying to get that Patreon working. And there wasn't anything new. Everything treats open source like all it is is charity. All you can expect is a cup of coffee and five bucks. So I decided that maybe it had to be me who fixed this problem. And I went down the rabbit hole finding new ideas, trying to find new ideas about it.

And it was a moment of inspiration one evening. I've had some weed. And I realized that crypto smart contracts and that package manager data, that dependency information, I could use that. I could do something with that. Maybe that would be the solution. So we're going to see. MARK MANDELMANN, We're going to see.

When? When? Yeah, so hopefully by the end of the year, maybe early next year. And how long will it take? Everything's built. Everything's ready. Well, why aren't we hitting go? It turns out crypto's got a lot of legal red tape. Yeah. As you might expect. Yeah. So, yeah.

Well, you're totally right that a lot of developers are very anti-crypto, and so that's been a battle from the start. Hacker News hate me even more than usual. But inside the crypto sphere, it's very popular. 1.7 million signups is pretty unheard of.

And what it turns out to be the case, to my surprise, I've spoken to over 300 open source devs over the last three years, just for market research reasons, a lot of them don't care if it's crypto or not. They like crypto in the respect that they like technology. Open source devs aren't as anti-crypto as the others, the rest of the devs.

And yeah, I think we have a reasonable chance of showing that crypto is just a technology. We're not a scam. There's nothing scammy about what's going on with us at all. They'll see that once we've gone live and no one's, you know, rugging the token or anything like that. Right. And, you know, it's all open. That's one of the beautiful things about Web3.