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.

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

Founder & CEO at @meritsystems.

Prev @a16zcrypto. 

Did my time in big tech, since recovered.

We back bold entrepreneurs building the next internet. 
a16zcrypto.com/

Crypto/web3. Author of Read Write Own

readwriteown.com

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

Okay that’s very cool, I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with. Good luck!

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”.