Editor's note: This article is from Orange Book (ID: chengpishu), reference article:The Applications Never Came, by Regan Bozman (Dev Report by Electric Capital), compiled by: Jessie, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

In the developer report recently released by Electric capital, based on the data of 130,000 developers, 3,000 developers were evaluated from the dimensions of Github code activity, Github Fork, smart contract interaction, and other indicators (such as the Truffle development framework to evaluate downloads). The developer community of a blockchain project. Let us see more intuitively the developer ecology in this field and its impact on the project development process.

So what is the significance of developers to blockchain project parties?

The blockchain actually competes with the ecology of the community of interests. The more applications (note the applications) in this interest ecology, the greater the value, and the value is directly reflected in the value of the token. To give an inappropriate example, for example, Y Combinator, a well-known American incubator, is an ecology of community of interests. The more users and the greater the value of the enterprises in his portfolio, the greater the value of him (YC) will naturally be.

The creators of applications are developers. For projects that want to build a long-term ecosystem, developers help you win users, and many retail investors are not users. I was before(https://orange.xyz/p/371) articleThere is also a trend mentioned in the article. After realizing this, many projects began to stop aimless airdrop activities, but found ways to reward those developers who contributed to the ecology, and shifted their focus to how to grow the developer community.

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The circle is so small, the global battle for developers

Over the past few years, teams in the blockchain space have devoted significant resources to attracting developers. In 2018, Block One, the team behind EOS, spent millions of dollars hosting hackathons around the world. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is also constantly preaching the ecology of Ethereum around the world. Overall, some of the most common strategies employed by blockchain teams include hackathons, project grants, and setting up eco-funds.

1.1 Hackathon Hackathon

Some mainstream projects, such as Ethereum, rely heavily on hackathons to win over developers. Since the ETHWaterloo hackathon in October 2017, they have held no less than 6 large-scale hackathons, attracting more than 4,000 developers. ETH Denver in February this year attracted 1,000 developers, exceeding the number in 2018.

Objectively speaking, the effectiveness of hackathons in keeping people in an ecosystem is less certain. Many teams who have sponsored blockchain hackathons have told me that most projects disappear after the hackathon. Not surprisingly, many developers like ETHDenver who participated in the weekend hackathon also had to return to full-time work on Monday morning.

But what I want to emphasize is that there are indeed a lot of influential projects emerging from the hackathon. Felix Feng created the earliest version of Set Protocol at the ETH Waterloo Hackathon in October 2017, and a few months later he raised $2 million from a group of prominent investors. In that hackathon, star applications such as CryptoKitties and Gitcoin were produced. Furthermore, these hackathons are likely to have a positive impact on the future of Ethereum. For example, it is quite possible for a developer to decide to enter the field full-time after participating in a hackathon for a few months.

Regan, head of operations at CoinList, described what he saw and felt when he attended ETHDenver in February. "Although the bounty was relatively small, there were over 1,000 developers from all over the world coming together. There wasn't any discussion about bounties or token prices, instead, people seemed genuinely excited to learn about Ethereum, actively getting acquainted Others from the community. While some of the progress in the Ethereum community has been less than ideal, I truly believe the community they have built is hard to replicate."

1.2 Grants

The subsidy mentioned here refers to a non-dilutive financial subsidy for teams building applications on a specific protocol, a bit like the Bounty Program. For example, the DEVGrants project launched by the Ethereum Foundation in early 2015 provides small grants of $1,000 to $10,000 for each project. By 2018, the stakes had clearly changed when the Ethereum Foundation restarted their grant program, with grants ranging from $10,000 to $1.5 million.

Most chains doing layer 1 have similar grants, including Zilliqa's $5M grant (June 2018), Protocol Labs' $5M research grant (April 2018), and Stellar's partner grant Project (November 2017). While all of these grant programs are aimed at fostering ecosystem growth, their specific purposes differ. Zilliqa, for example, focuses on "developing new applications on its open-source technology platform." Whereas Protocol Labs (Filecoin) focuses their grants on core development challenges such as their consensus algorithm.

The effectiveness of these plans is hard to tell. Because none of these projects are currently more than two years in development, and few of these funded projects publicly release data, it is too early to assess the success of early-stage companies. However, there are some success stories. For example, the Ethereum Foundation provided Uniswap with a $100,000 grant in August 2018. Since then, Uniswap has embarked on a fast track, and the current asset pool on the smart contract is $7 million.

1.3 Ecological Fund

The "eco-fund" here is broadly defined as a management fund that invests in diluted capital, with the goal of developing a specific ecosystem or protocol. This is an evolution of corporate venture capital. Enterprises set up ecological funds to make strategic and financial investments in early-stage startups. Therefore, funds that invest in crypto just to obtain investment returns are not ecological funds.

Consensys is a typical representative of ecological funds. Its investment ecology includes: Truffle is a development framework of Ethereum, with hundreds of thousands of downloads. MetaMask is the most popular Ethereum wallet in the world with over 1.3 million downloads.

The general practice of the agreement is to allocate a part of it as an ecological fund through the foundation (usually raised through ICO). EOS raised $4 billion in the ICO, and allocated $1 billion to invest in ecological projects built on EOS. In addition, EOS has also participated in co-launching a US$100 million European fund and a US$200 million Asian fund.

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Gitcoin's Online Hackathon Thoughts

Because I have been paying attention to and participating in the online hackathon carried out by gitcoin during this period, this process has allowed me to see another way of thinking that may effectively build a developer community, and further triggered thinking about distributed collaboration methods.

This is a 15-day online Hackathon jointly initiated by Microsoft and Gitcoin. It is mainly in the form of bounty competitions. At the same time, everyone is encouraged to submit their own innovative projects that are not limited to bounty. All bonuses are denominated in Dai, ranging from hundreds to thousands of Dai. The sponsors who provided the competition included Microsoft, Consensys labs, Mythx, Nucypher, Chainlink and other 17 projects and companies in the encryption field.

During this process, I observed some performances of developers: 1. Contributing superior skills, actively seeking organizations 2. Demand for collaboration

Generally speaking, a hackathon should be an offline activity, a 24-hour teamwork and all-night collaboration. But if you think about it carefully, the hackathon itself reflects a distributed collaboration method. This hackathon let me see the possibility of online collaboration that can replace offline experience. In other words, all things that need to be done through offline contact can be enhanced through online tools, and even give developers more space to innovate and collaborate. For the project side, it is also possible to attract global developers at a lower cost.

So how does Gitcoin and the participants do it?

First, interactivity is enhanced with some distributed collaboration tools:

1. The Discord group is used as the main collaboration position for sub-theme discussions and group formation

2. Email list for information integration and release for updating important progress. For example, which sponsors have their bounty onboard; there will be online live Q&A at xxx time, etc.

3.Google form registration information, matching and group registration of hacker information and project information with team formation requirements, to facilitate demand matching.

4. Zoom online foundation meetings to enhance communication and trust. Opened a Zoom channel to regularly organize online hacker face-to-face foundation meetings, mainly to help form groups. And invite sponsors to explain the competition questions and provide guidance.

Secondly, the communication and interaction between the participants are very sufficient.

With the tools above, developers won't come to the bowl unless you set a very compelling bonus. Therefore, in terms of attracting developers, the necessary communication is extremely important. The premise of this kind of communication is to clearly know what developers need to do, and know what they can help developers.

What impressed me most was a conversation in the Consensys Labs group. The developer kiba in the picture wanted to create a data forward market, and explained the idea from two aspects: the data provider and the data producer. Then Gabe from Consensys labs came out to affirm the idea and raised questions at the same time: 1) What is the role of adding a price discovery mechanism on the basis of a multi-party market? 2) Why is blockchain needed?

There are many other examples like this. It has to be said that more innovations and ideas will be stimulated during this interactive process. So if you don’t know the developers, and you don’t know what kind of ecology you want to create with the developers, it’s useless to do more marketing activities.

In addition, the time of this hackahon also gives sufficient possibility to improve the collaborative experience. Two weeks is not too short, allowing enough time for developers to get to know each other. It will not be too long, so that everyone has a certain sense of urgency, and intensive development will begin after the group is over.

Of course, most of these are superficial observations, and there are still many ideas and operational details involved. This online Hackathon is also a very ingenious way for gitcoin to attract users (get user onboard), but whether the final output can reach or even exceed the level of offline intensive development hackathon, will it appear again like encryption For a popular app like Mao, we will see the result in two weeks.

Developer engagement remains one of the most important yet unexplored areas of the blockchain space. In fact, current articles on smart contract platforms focus on technical or academic topics, such as consensus mechanisms and on-chain governance. These topics are of course very important, but this is based on the assumption that the entire ecosystem is already prosperous and effective. Without developers, these topics would be impossible to talk about.