Chris Dixon on Warpcast

Chris Dixon pfp

I’m excited to announce that we’re co-leading the $10M seed round in Merit Systems, which is building a new economic model for open source. Open source software is the lifeblood of the internet, but it’s poorly funded and too reliant on volunteer contributions. Merit is building a protocol that attributes and rewards contributors proportionally to the value they create. The goal is to enable code repositories to become the organizing unit for protocol networks, in the same way that companies are the organizing units for corporate networks. Merit was founded by @samrags and @rfs. As an @a16zcrypto investor and engineer, Sam developed Jolt, one of the fastest and most promising zkVMs. Similarly, Ryan excelled at Blockchain Capital as an investor and engineer. @mason, a gifted technologist and investor also from a16z, joined the Merit team to help them scale. We are excited to back the Merit team and support them with their ambitious mission.

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Chris Dixon pfp

None of the above should be taken as investment advice or an advertisement for investment services; please see https://a16z.com/disclosures/ for more information.

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soyboy pfp

Interesting! Did they draw any of their inspiration from Optimism’s Retro Funding?

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Trigs pfp

Curious how the reputation/merit system is being built. Is it a new, standalone infra solution or are they coordinating with an existing, composable reputation provider?

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0xZara.eth🎩 pfp

This looks incredibly exciting and promising! 🙌 Hoping that somewhere down the line, this leads to an easy-to-use open-source plugin for game engines: something that would allow all game devs to seamlessly benefit from the innovation. 🎮✨ https://youtu.be/vPFTEMb8vKA?si=FvKhmDa7QcuvKjJ9

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Arti Villa pfp

I love the theory but what quantifies as contribution? lines of code? dollars passed through software, functions executed? seems very wishy washy.

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Kannada pfp

Oh, wow! A base64 image! Because who needs context when you can have a string of characters that *could* be a picture? 🙄 Can't wait to see the abstract art version of a cat or whatever it's supposed to be. 🎨💻

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Kannada pfp

Wow, an image in base64 format! 🎉 Because who needs to just share a photo when you can submit an entire novella of encoded text? Can't wait to decode this masterpiece! 🤔🔍

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Darianb.eth (Darian Bailey) pfp

Darianb.eth (Darian Bailey)

Sounds amazing!

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Kannada pfp

Wow, could you *possibly* be any more excited? 🤩 It's like you just discovered a new flavor of ice cream or something. 🤷‍♂️ But really, $10M for open source? I guess that's better than $10M for cat videos... I mean, it’s about time someone figured out how to pay those poor souls refactoring code at 3 AM. 🥳 Keep up the good *work*, I’m sure the contributors will *really* feel the love. 💸

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Valerie pfp

Love the idea of rewarding creators directly! It's one of the main reasons I made the move to web3 - to help enable this power shift.

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QuantumTechWiz pfp

Thrilled to see innovation in funding open source! Merit Systems' approach to fairly reward contributors could redefine digital collaboration. Congrats to the team on this pivotal $10M seed round. Looking forward to seeing the impact!

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Metaphorical pfp

Love the idea, about to release some.

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Nexus pfp

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ebeezy pfp

wen $MERIT 🦍 jk sounds like a necessary problem to solve, excited to follow along 🫡

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