SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tea Inc., a new company building an open-source software platform on the blockchain, today released its whitepaper detailing its protocol for remunerating open-source developers. Tea is developing a first-of-its-kind decentralized system for fairly remunerating open-source developers based on their contributions to the entire ecosystem.
The Tea blockchain will include a reputation system and an immutable decentralized registry designed to distribute value to developers based on their contribution to the ecosystem’s utility and health. Value can enter the graph at apex points—apps and essential libraries—and be distributed to the dependencies of those apex points and their dependencies recursively since the registry knows the entire open-source graph.
“Tea's mission is to empower open-source communities and ensure their contributors are supported as they create the tools that build the Internet,” said co-founder Max Howell, the creator of open-source software package management system Homebrew. “Tea’s combination of tools, information, and rewards will justly incentivize developers, helping stimulate the growth of open-source software and foster innovation.”
The key attributes of Tea’s open-source development ecosystem include:
- Unprecedented offering of rewards: The Tea blockchain will reward contributors and participants in the open-source community through Tea tokens. For example, upon successfully submitting a package, the package maintainer will receive a non-fungible token (NFT) to evidence their work and contribution. The holder of this NFT will receive a portion of the Tea token rewards associated with the use of the package while the remaining value flows down to all those who contributed to the code. Tea also intends to develop—and incentivize others to develop—mechanisms for package users to support package maintainers through unique use cases of the Tea token.
- Decentralization at its core: Tea is decentralized at every layer from day-to-day development to package distribution, which increases reliability and provides native, built-in virtual environments for every tool in the stack. Tea's decentralization also offers tangible benefits to ecosystem security, with every layer of apps and dapps signed and verified on-chain.
- Use of blockchain technology: Blockchain technology, and more explicitly staking, offers a unique opportunity to tackle this challenge of rewarding open-source developers for the first time. Each action performed by developers, such as submitting packages, verifying packages, or locking value to support them, will contribute to their reputation, thus creating a unique profile each developer can use to both contribute to the community and participate in its governance.
- On-chain governance: Tea includes on-chain governance where all token holders can suggest and vote on changes to critical parameters weighted by token ownership and reputation. These parameters could include inflation, transaction fees, staking rewards, steeping rewards, or optimum steeping ratio.
- Community-lead accountability and validation: Tea tasters are experienced software developers willing to dedicate time to check the claims associated with a package (functionality, security, semantic versioning, license accuracy, etc.). Tea tasters stake both their reputation and economic value to demonstrate the outcome of their analysis. By requiring third-party community reviewers to incur the risk of losing a portion of their tokens should they behave against the network's interest, tea community members can provide additional credence to a package and receive a reward in the form of Tea tokens.
“We intend to create a platform for applications secured by reputation and financial incentives,” explained co-founder Timothy Lewis. “Supported by the right economic incentives and rewards, more developers will be in a position to build, improve and augment open-source software for the betterment of the world.”
Open-source developers interested in contributing code or verifying contributed code can register with Tea’s authentication tool and receive rewards once verified as open-source contributors.
To read the full whitepaper, visit https://tea.xyz/white-paper/.
About Tea Inc.
Tea Inc. is a Puerto Rico-based corporation that is building the open-source toolkit that makes development possible and builds the internet: it’s “brew2 for web3”. Developers can work on any platform, CI/CD on any platform, deploy on any platform; Tea abstracts this detail away so developers can get on with the work that matters. Those interested in joining the team fixing how open-source is funded should reach out through Telegram or Discord at https://linktr.ee/teaxyz.