Many of the digital asset market’s current leaders - like Bitcoin and Ethereum - are open source and developers across the globe actively seek to improve these platforms. Now, a new project called ETHPrize aims to organize large bounties to incentivize the focused development of solutions to major struggles faced in the world of Ethereum development. The project is created in partnership with TrueBit, the Web3foundation, and Toronto-based L4 Ventures; a Vitalik Buterin-advised project which aims to create a decentralized web. ETHPrize debuted at this year’s Ethereum Community Conference in early March, hosted in Paris, where the team stated that a little bit of development coordination could have a huge impact on the Ethereum platform and, consequently, the world at large.
Platforms like Ethereum are, by design, decentralized. This means that Ethereum doesn’t have a core development hierarchy in the traditional sense. While certain developers like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin certainly hold more influence than others, it is ultimately up to the community to decide the platform’s future. Open source projects like Ethereum will live or die at the hands of the community, and it is the role of developers throughout the world to further the platform in accordance with the needs of users, businesses, and future-sustainability. What bounties hope to do is incentivize development teams to attempt to solve issues that exist within the platform in exchange for a monetary reward.
As the ETHPrize team explained, a lack of coordination and targeted development continues to create a less-than-ideal environment for Ethereum developers. To get to the root of the problem, the team stated they conducted 50 one-hour interviews with various Ethereum developers across the ecosystem and aim to make their findings public.According to ETHPrize, a lot of projects attempt to solve the same issues, and redundancy is created due to a general lack of collaboration. Through launching large, actively managed bounties, the team hopes to incentivize developers to create the foundational building blocks that would make development easier for other teams and projects.“How do you solve the tragedy of the commons?” asked TrueBit COO, Robert Bent, at the Ethereum Community Conference. “Where infrastructure is needed for each team, but there’s no real incentive for a single team to build it. That’s really what the goal of ETHPrize is.” L4 Ventures co-founder Josh Stark further added that current bounties aren’t always sufficient due to a lack of active management. According to Stark, bounties need to be large enough to compensate the opportunity costs of great development teams in order to ensure long lasting results. “There are so many opportunities out there for talented developers that have experience in this space,” said Stark. “We need to pull them away from projects that are short-term profit driven to focus on things that have long-term extraordinary value for the whole ecosystem.”Currently, the team received funding commitments from the Ethereum Community Fund, Status, Toshi Coinbase, and 0x. Moving forward, ETHPrize aims to secure funding that will allow for the creation of large bounties, and invite the community to get involved.Image credit: Ethereum logo
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