FundRequest is a decentralised marketplace for open source collaboration. On their platform, a company can fund open issues on any project, and programmers who solve these problems are paid for. This bridges an important gap in the open source world, where enthusiastic programmers put in hard work contributing to open source projects, and companies are hungry for talent and just can’t find them. As their whitepaper aptly puts it –
Inspired by the rise of the gig economy, we bring together developers and organizations requesting open source development.
The blockchain use case
FundRequest uses blockchain and smart contracts to manage contract resolutions between project funders. The way it works is as follows –
- A funder adds funds to a request on the FundRequest platform
- FundRequest locks these funds in a smart contract that acts as an escrow service
- A solver wants to solve that request and indicates this intention by staking towards it
- The solver solved the request and wants to claim the reward
- The project owner gets notified of the claim and validates it
- Once the project owner validated the claim, a cooldown period is initiated during which the funds and stakes remain frozen. This is done to prevent any malicious behaviour from funders and solvers.
- Once the cooldown period has elapsed, the solver can withdraw the funds together with his stakes. In addition, the SkillToken Factory rewards the solver with skill-specific tokens.
There is also a detailed section on dispute resolving and how teams can be managed in the whitepaper, which is a good sign, as the company has gone into fair detail on how the product would work. The idea of skill-based tokens a brilliant way to quantify skill within the platform, where funders can very easily filter candidates based on their proficiency.
Token Utility
The token utility is fairly straightforward. FND tokens are utility tokens which will be used by solvers, to stake towards an issue and solvers will always be required to hold some FND tokens. Initially, every issue can only be funded and rewarded with FND tokens, but over time the team intends to allow funding via other tokens and even fiat currencies.
This last bit of opening up the payments ecosystems to other modes of payments is clever from a business development standpoint, as most companies might find acquiring FND tokens to be a barrier to entry to using the platform.
The team
To us, this is one of the most refreshing blockchain teams out there. While most ICOs are peppered with business leaders, it is nice to see an almost all developer core team with FundRequest. Co-Founder and CEO Karel Striegel is an experienced dev-ops engineer and the CTO, as well as the COO, have strong computer science backgrounds.
The mentality of this team comes through in their fund allocation, where 60% of the funds raised will be allocated for product development – this is rare.
Partnerships
We had recently reported about FundRequests partnership with SingularityNet for AI integration. Hot on its heels is another partnership with Indorse, a reward-based decentralized professional social network where users can control their data, to match talented and certified open source developers with available projects, bounties and jobs.
The combination of the two systems will provide people with a legitimate professional record to showcase their Indorse profile on FundRequest while simultaneously allowing Indorse users to search for programming jobs and bounties on FundRequest.“Partnering with Indorse is a perfect symbiotic relationship for our goals with FundRequest,” said Karel Striegel, CEO FundRequest. “We will give Indorse users access to projects and jobs in the blockchain and open source communities, meanwhile we will have access to vetted, top quality developers to work on the projects on our platform.”
The collaboration will closely tie the projects together. Users will be able to display and link their Indorse profile on the FundRequest platform, and reversely show their FundRequest activity on the Indorse system.
We’re noticing a healthy pattern when the FundRequest team works very closely with companies with mutual interests. This particular one works towards legitimising the skill of a developer while providing developers across platforms with access to gigs. This truly shows the mission-driven approach of FundRequest.
Our take
FundRequest recently concluded a 12.5 million USD crowdsale, are have recently launched a private alpha of their platform. In the time to come, they will look to launching the platform to the public, and populate the marketplace on both ends.
In our opinion, this is a solid platform that is solving a very real problem. Any developer related stat that you come across will tell you how companies are hungry for top programming talent, and there never really has been a way to fund open source development, barring programs like Google Summer of Code and other bounty programs.
It is now a question of adoption on both ends. While we can think of quite a few programmers who will greatly love such a platform, and the recent partnership strengthens the supply side of the marketplace, will corporates adopt this unconventional method for building their solution? Time will tell.
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