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.