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not my first rodeo 👨🏾‍🚀 |
@a16zcrypto 👾

OS repos don’t have the ability to take a fee. They’d need to incorporate or register as a non-for-profit.

Cline and Roo are fully Open Source Cursor competitors. Today they're doing over  $7.5M MRR on the Claude models alone (via @openrouterai). Their take rate? 0.

It's unprecedented in the history of computing for the infrastructure layer to accrue all the value.

Discover and use the latest LLMs, privately, and pay with crypto. 300+ models. openrouter.ai

We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/03/29/pubos.html

Soon OSS funding will have a real solution

this is what @meritsystems  is focusing on at the system/infra layer I believe

cc @samrags

Founder & CEO at @meritsystems.

Prev @a16zcrypto. 

Did my time in big tech, since recovered.

A new economy for open source.

We are hiring talented engineers to build the future of software. Apply now!

https://merit.systems/careers

this is what @meritsystems  is focusing on at the system/infra layer I believe

cc @samrags  

https://www.merit.systems/manifesto

Working @Gnosis | Usually in Singapore, Taipei, Berlin or Toronto. | Here for 📸 🚴 🍕☕️

Gnosis.io

investor at collab+currency, curation at fingerprintsdao, @aradtski on birdsite

we’re going to start with OS ecosystem that are well funded but centralized, show strong ROI and expand. stay tuned

tech vs. absurd – you're not real – /addresso - /sauce – /cto

Yeah we don't plan to go down the liquid governance path. 

I'm glad the space ran the experiment but it's time for more direct funding mechanisms to the builders.

Big fan of Optimism’s PGF efforts. 

Our goal is a step closer to the metal. PGF asks “how should funds be allocated to an ecosystem”, we as “how should funds be allocated within a repo”.

standalone. coming soon to block space near you

a16z crypto, prev engineer @ bloXroute labs, Consensys.
Creator of farcaster-py.
0xMasonH.twitter

Let's go @samrags @mason @rfs 

https://www.merit.systems/fundraise

Today we're coming out of stealth and announcing a $10M fundraise to accelerate Open Source Capitalism.

Open Source is civilization's greatest accomplishment. Where corporations fail to innovate as they scale, Open Source leads the frontier. 

All of the best technologies, from databases and web frameworks to cryptography and game engines, are created in the open.

Software with zero-cost replication allowed massive teams to collaborate on the same technical artifacts. Open Source permeated the barriers between corps and allowed humanity's greatest minds to work on shared technical foundations.

But funding Open Source has been a perennial challenge. Tragedy of the commons this, tragedy of the commons that. 

While we applaud the push to increase altruism directed at Open Source, banking on goodwill isn't our idea of a prosperous future.

@merit_systems is the vision I've had for crypto since I entered the space through UniswapV2 MEV back in 2021. 

Blockchains are good at settlement. The largest market for settlement is not memecoins but labor. The most productive category of labor is Open Source Software.

Very proud to unveil @meritsystems alongside @rfs @mason.

Deep funding combines two ideas:

1. Value as a graph: instead of asking "how much did X contribute to humanity?", ask "how much of the credit for Y belongs to X?"
2. Distilled human judgement: an open market of AIs fills in all the weights, human jury randomly spot-checks them

https://x.com/TheDevanshMehta/status/1867600164502089925

(1) has been a growing paradigm recently, for good reason. Contribution is hard to measure in the abstract: if you ask people how much they would pay to save N birds, they answer $80 for N=2000 and N=200000. "Local" questions like "is A or B more valuable to C?" are much more tractable.

(2) is based on ideas in my info finance post: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/11/09/infofinance.html#info-finance-for-distilled-human-judgement . Anyone can use any methods (eg. AI) to suggest weights for *all* edges, a human jury does detailed analysis on a random subset. The submissions that are most compatible with the jury answers decide the final output.

https://deepfunding.org/

Awesome effort to make the hidden network of open source work legible. OSS is an engine of tremendous economic productivity.

Deep Funding builds a weighted dependency graph of the open source ecosystem to enable fair, automated payments for sustaining developers.

$170k is meaningful, but once fragmented across hundreds of repos, each will receive $50-$5k. The payment is unlikely to cover its own admin overhead.

Our team at Merit Systems is focused on reducing the friction in the last mile and growing the pie. We expect automated incentives for code contributions to hit escape velocity soon. Stay posted for more details.

PERSONAL UPDATE: After an amazing 3.5 years, I’m leaving a16z to work on something new (more on that below).

It’s been an incredible experience getting to work with our portcos alongside some of the smartest people I know. 

To the entire a16z team, especially @cdixon and Ali and the rest of the deal team: thank you for showing me what having a truly world-class culture means. You make a16z special.

To all the founders I’ve met and worked with: it’s been an honor to be a part of your journey. I’ve learned so much from you and am excited for the things to come.

So what’s next? I’m joining the indomitable @samrags and @rfs to build Merit Systems. We are building tools, markets, and mechanisms to create an entirely new economy for software creation and contribution.

Stay tuned for more information and announcements in the coming weeks. It’s time to build.

@samrags was working on zk airdrops before it was cool 

https://github.com/a16z/zkdrops

Definitely on the roadmap but not a short term priority. We're going to focus on getting Jolt on-chain with curves first.

I can't give you a concrete timeline, but we're working on it. To start we'll mock the commitment scheme and get the sumchecks + GKR working over the Binius fields.

July Roadmap Update

TL;DR: Jolt is faster, simpler, and more usable than ever.

Huge shoutout to the contributors who made this happen!