Author: Joyce, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

In the field of Web3 technology, the development of open source software is a key link, but this process still needs to be simplified and lacks a sound incentive mechanism. For contributors to the development, it takes several days to find an open repository that accepts contributions, and it takes several weeks to receive feedback on pull requests. In order to have the opportunity to receive rewards, contributors must spend several days writing proposals and wait for up to 3 months to receive funding or rewards.

For protocol project parties, most companies have a demand for open source contributors and a plan to allocate budgets for them. However, they have not found the correct way to match these contributors and do not have a mechanism to motivate them in the long term and in a reasonable way. Traditional grant or bounty programs mainly attract one-time contributors and do not have long-term cooperation with "mercenary-style" developers.

According to DeveloperReport data, as of June 2023, there are over 21,338 developers who are active in the Web3 ecosystem every month. Only 31% of them are full-time developers, while 54% are part-time developers, totaling over 10,000.

OnlyDust is a platform that simplifies, organizes, and motivates Web3 open source software development. On September 15th, OnlyDust announced the completion of a 3 million euro financing round, led by Fabric Ventures, with participation from Frst, Ergodic (LambdaClass), and Stake Capital.

Fabric Ventures believes that the business model that is suitable for the developer ecosystem around open source projects should be able to fairly incentivize all contributors and participants to create a distributed digital economy model in each network. Based on this view, Fabric Ventures has high hopes for OnlyDust, calling it "the largest open source developer coordination community in the Web3 ecosystem," and "our portfolio founders are all full of praise for this team."

Web3 Open Source Contributor's Social Network

As part of the $3 million funding completed by OnlyDust, Ergodic (LambdaClass) and Stake Capital, both as investors, have had more or less cooperation with OnlyDust. OnlyDust has previously collaborated with StarkWare to host multiple hackathon events and has also participated as a co-organizer in the LambdaZK week.

As an open-source software developer platform originally serving Starkware, OnlyDust has now become a social network for Web3 open-source contributors. Through OnlyDust, developers can effectively find projects that suit their expertise and contribute to them, and receive contribution rewards (in the form of tokens or USDC).

Currently, there are 1734 development contributors on OnlyDust. From January to now, the rewards earned by contributors on OnlyDust have increased by over 10 times, and the bonuses released through OnlyDust have reached 944,595 US dollars.

On the OnlyDust homepage, contributors can filter projects by selecting technology or funding sources, or browse based on popularity, number of contributors, and number of funding sources. They can also search for project names directly in the search bar. Currently, there are 69 projects available for contributors to choose from on OnlyDust.

Each project provides project introduction, GitHub database, and sponsor information. You can view the developers who have contributed to the project and their income ranking in the contributor list.

You can jump to the homepage of individual developers from the contributor list, which displays the developer's expertise, projects they have contributed to, and rewards earned through OnlyDust. OnlyDust provides the contact information of developers, allowing interested project parties to directly contact them.

Starknet Innovation Engine for Ecosystem

Kakarot, favored and invested by Vitalik, is a Starknet ecosystem project completed by developers recruited through OnlyDust.

According to reports, the team initially had only about 10 people. However, on OnlyDust, it can be seen that currently 137 contributors are involved in the development of Kakarot. Founder eliastaz (@ETazou) once said, "I use OnlyDust every week, it has solved many problems for me."

Kakarot is a zkEVM written in Cairo, allowing users to take advantage of the scalability benefits of validity aggregation while maintaining compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem. Cairo is a Turing-complete language associated with CairoVM, which uses polynomial and ZK-STARK proof systems to achieve provable computation. In OnlyDust, Cairo tags are provided to effectively match developers and project parties.

Currently, OnlyDust has provided support for ZK Rollups, privacy, decentralized finance, and other aspects to 500 developers from 17 countries. Over 15 protocols and companies, including Starkware, Starknet Foundation, OP Foundation, Nethermind, Aptos, Zama, and Ethereum Foundation, are using OnlyDust to coordinate cash and token incentives for contributors.

On September 7th, the team released the latest improvement of OnlyDust. Developers can now publish technical sharing on their personal homepage and share their projects on other platforms with URL, project name, and description to attract attention. Project owners can contact interested contributors through OnlyDust and add their Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and LinkedIn accounts.

OnlyDust team said that they hope to provide developers and project parties with perfect matching with the help of comprehensive indicators in three months, and provide one-click incentive and smooth onboarding management services for project parties in six months. Currently, information on project recruitment supported by OnlyDust can be found on its homepage.

For project teams, managing open source projects through Github can be time-consuming and risky due to unstable contributors. OnlyDust can help attract new developers and collaborators and develop funding plans. OnlyDust claims to have "data-driven ecosystem insights" that collect and analyze data on the project's ecosystem, monitor the progress and impact of incentive plans for contributors, and provide strategic planning recommendations based on analysis results to help project teams manage incentive plans.

Unlike traditional incentive plans, the project leader of OnlyDust directly distributes bonuses to development contributors. The funds will not be transferred directly to the project account, and the project leader can use the budget on their project. The incentive plan will start with a small budget and release future funds based on project milestones and performance.

Currently, it seems that OnlyDust is still primarily serving projects on the Starknet ecosystem. However, when announcing the completion of a 3 million euro financing, OnlyDust stated that its annual plan is to "welcome 50 ecosystems", and its lead investor Frabic Ventures also referred to it as "the largest open source developer coordinator in the Web3 ecosystem".

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