Snapbrillia was born six months ago with the mission to accelerate the world's transition to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce and guarantee fair opportunities for all through the adoption of AI and blockchain technologies globally. Earlier in February after deep research and much deliberation, we decided to work with the Cardano network to deploy an open-source quadratic voting and funding platform to foster a community of open-source projects, contributors, and entrepreneurs.
Open source is a public good. Quadratic funding optimizes matching funds by prioritizing open-source projects based on the number of people who contributed and voted. This way, funds meant to benefit the public go towards projects that really benefit a broad public ensuring future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today like open-source tools, instead of things that only have a few wealthy backers.
Our solution is an open-sourced quadratic voting and funding platform that aims to support open-source fundraising campaigns and increase collaborative contributions where open-source projects and entrepreneurs will be able to fund match or raise funds in multiple currencies in a decentralized marketplace with security, transparency, and a streamlined user experience.
Examples of traditional crowdfunding:
Project 1 gets $100 from 1 funder.
Project 2 gets $100 from 10 funders.
At the end of the round, both projects get $100 in matching.
Examples of quadratic funding:
Project 1 gets $100 from 1 funder.
Project 2 gets $100 from 10 funders.
At the end of the round, Project 1 gets $10 in matching, Project 2 gets $190 in matching. [1]
Quadratic funding strongly encourages people to make contributions, no matter how small and ensures a democratic allocation of funds meant to benefit the public. [2] This is especially relevant now with the introduction of the dReps (delegation representatives) voting system here on Catalyst where voting is going to be centralized from tens of thousands of voters to 150 representative delegates. [3] When voting power is consolidated into a few individuals instead of democratizing voting for public goods like open-source tools and projects, it doesn't always advance the public good and it weakens democracy. [4] We want to drive higher enthusiasm for the Cardano ecosystem, community, and open-source projects overall because both the funding sources and voting power will become more decentralized. This enforces different individuals and communities to align between different open source community efforts to produce the most public good instead of consolidating funding and voting power to themselves.
There is a massive opportunity for the Cardano open-source and dev community to grow and scale because engineering hiring and job hunting suck not just for Web3 but across tech globally. The hiring environment is extremely competitive with 1,847,900 open software engineering jobs in the US alone [5] when the US provides only 47,906 CS graduates each year. There is also a huge gap in gender diversity (21.7%) and ethnic diversity (15.5%) among computer science graduates. [6] At the same time, over 25 million people have quit their jobs in the last 6 months and as many as 375 million people will quit their jobs between now and 2030 hoping to break into better careers globally. [7]
Quadratic voting and funding together with Snapbrillia Mentor-mentee Bounties & eLearning will empower people to collaborate and share their knowledge to build a sustainable open-source ecosystem in and out of Cardano. [8] Maximizing the impact of public goods available on Cardano and decentralizing the funding sources for public goods provides one of the final pieces required for the Cardano network to become a self-sustaining system - Voltaire. To foster sustained collaboration between open source experts and new collaborators we need to build an Open-Source On-Chain Practical Resume on ATALA Prism through our partnership with RootsID SSI Wallet to provide proof of reputation that helps people build and showcase their work history, credentials, projects, and contributions because it's our basic human right to control our money, data, and identity including our career.
Snapbrillia provides an alternative for emerging open-source contributors to quickly get hands-on experience through a mentor-mentee eLearning marketplace of open-source bounties, open-source workshops, and open-source hackathons. For seasoned developers and entrepreneurs, Snapbrillia provides a way to democratically grow support and funding for their projects and quickly attract experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work. Our user research and startup journey have led us to the blockchain, Cardano, and the infinite possibilities that this platform and technology can provide to streamline and minimize bias in funding and hiring to guarantee more fair opportunities for all through open-source and blockchain. We are excited to share more about it with you.
Entrepreneurs and developers from all over the world will be able to register their projects for a quadratic funding campaign to compete for open-source grants and funds. We want to create a rewarding incentive system for open-source projects and accelerate the development of common tools, frameworks, core infrastructures, and proof of concepts that are created and owned by the community for the community.
This will allow users and projects without technical knowledge related to blockchain technologies, to launch their funding campaigns and fund them and this platform will facilitate everything directly on Cardano.
Together with our Decentralized eLearning and No-code-setup Collaborative Cloud IDE (with support of 60 coding languages and frameworks including Haskell, Plutus, and Marlowe) [8], this also allows new contributors to effectively join open-source projects and build their Practical On-Chain Resume. Our combined platform accelerates the open web in and out of the Cardano network by tapping into the network effect in the broader open-source community. [9] [10] [11]
Global crowdfunding exploded from $8.61 billion in 2020 to $113.52 billion last year – a 1,021% increase with an average of $1,315 per investor. [12] 76% of investors believe it is important to fund Women and Minority entrepreneurs. Investment crowdfunding has proven itself as a scalable way to do that. [13]
If we can execute well to build this quadratic funding platform, the Cardano open-source community will immensely benefit from the crowdfunding's massive growth to become a $239.78 billion industry by 2026 with an 18.97% year-over-year growth rate. [14] Better access to opportunities, funding, and learning bring developers and entrepreneurs together to co-create.
Take Gitcoin as an example of why quadratic voting and funding build trust between individuals, bigger projects, and major donors within and outside of ETH and the open-source ecosystem. GitCoin was able to drive $58,275,259 funding to open source projects with major donors matching individuals' funding of their passion open source project. [15] [16] We can do better especially with the Catalyst community and our Fortune 1000 partners, perhaps becoming the first major fund matching donors on this platform. The sheer hiring demand and the average hiring costs of $28,548.00 to $35,684.00 for developers with real (open source) work experience by bigger projects and companies creates a perfect storm for a platform like this. [17] We believe that with our Fortune 1000 relationships, API access to a network of 840 million professionals, and Cardano's Gitcoin, we can drive this huge appetite of major projects and companies to join this quadratic funding matching community to fund more and also bigger open-source teams. 🔥
Please make sure to also check out the links and attachments to see the evidence of the benefits quadratic voting and funding platforms like GitCoin have on the open-source community in and outside of the Ethereum network in 2021 alone. We need the same and better for the Cardano network. [18]
[1] <https://ethresear.ch/t/pairwise-coordination-subsidies-a-new-quadratic-funding-design/5553>
[2] <https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/quadratic-funding/>
[3] <https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/435.pdf>
[4] <https://www.worldcat.org/title/voting-squared-quadratic-voting-in-democratic-politics/oclc/869561134>
[5] <https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm>
[6] <https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701>
[7] <https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/what%20the%20future%20of%20work%20will%20mean%20for%20jobs%20skills%20and%20wages/mgi-jobs-lost-jobs-gained-executive-summary-december-6-2017.pdf>
[8] <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/397419>
[9] <https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1311/1311.1334.pdf>
[10] <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.11300.pdf>
[11] <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.04414.pdf>
[12] <https://financefeeds.com/private-markets-equity-crowdfunding-expected-soar-2022/>
[13] <https://www.prweb.com/releases/2022/01/prweb18413822.htm>
[14] <https://www.technavio.com/report/crowdfunding-market-industry-service-analysis>
[15] <https://gitcoin.co/results>
[16] <https://github.com/Photrek/Cardano-Catalyst/blob/main/Diversify%20Voting%20Influence/Cardano%20DVI%20Presentation%206Oct2021.pdf>
[17] <https://codesubmit.io/blog/cost-of-hiring-a-software-developer>
[18] <https://gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-2021-year-in-review/>
We need resources including time, money, and additional helping hands and expertise in Plutus, Marlowe, and Prism to be able to execute this project effectively. To make this possible, Snapbrillia will have to further expand its No-code-setup Collaborative Cloud IDE that supports over 60 languages and frameworks including Haskel to also include Plutus and Marlowe.
Furthermore, we will have to create the DeFi marketplace on the blockchain for bounties and grants (smart contract and governance) and the decentralized eLearning user experience between mentors and mentees.