Dialogue with Gitcoin's Head of Developer Relations: We are not short on money; we just want to make friends with the leaders of Web3!

*This article was published by: ETHPlanet (a global non-profit Ethereum community organization), authorized for forwarding by Chain Catcher, and edited without altering the original meaning, * Original title: “The Stories of Ethereum Developers at ETHPlanet” Issue 2: Exclusive Interview with Scott Moore from Gitcoin

Sometimes, money alone is not enough to encourage development. Scott Moore, the head of developer relations at Gitcoin, shared with us the secrets to Gitcoin's success and the latest round of the Gitcoin Grants bounty program.

“The Stories of Ethereum Developers at ETHPlanet” is a new interview series we have launched. We invite developers and builders from the Ethereum world to share how they are using blockchain technology to tackle important challenges they care about and reveal the secrets behind product development.

Founded in 2017, Gitcoin has grown from a small open-source platform to a large community with nearly 40,000 developers in less than three years. In Scott's words, "the vast majority of Ethereum developers are in this community." As an early experimenter of the "quadratic funding" mechanism, the Gitcoin Grants bounty program has successfully helped web3 projects from around the world raise nearly $2 million!

We were curious about these amazing figures, so we conducted an exclusive interview with Scott Moore, hoping he could help us answer our questions.

Highlights you can't miss from the interview:

• How did Gitcoin grow from a small open-source community to a platform that everyone wants to join, becoming an indispensable part of the entire blockchain industry and open-source tech community?

• How does Gitcoin motivate programmers to wake up every day excited to go on Gitcoin and publish their work?

• The secret to recruiting the first 100 early users.

• What new features are there in the sixth round of Gitcoin Grants, and why should programmers participate?

Alright, let's see what Scott has to say!

1. Please introduce yourself, your background, and how you got into the blockchain industry?

Scott Moore: In fact, like many others (one could say the number is quite astonishing), I was working in finance before I discovered Ethereum. Initially, I was building machine learning models for a small lending institution, then I went to work at a private equity firm, during which I became somewhat disillusioned with how the entire industry operated.

Although I had heard of Bitcoin before, it wasn't until around 2015 when I stumbled upon Ethereum that I realized how appealing the idea of building more complex logic into a new financial system could be. Overall, I feel quite lucky because there happened to be a cutting-edge discussion conference in Toronto (my city) at that time, so I went to see what was happening, and since then, I have been deeply enamored with Ethereum. Interestingly, the famous hack.ether.camp took place right after that conference. It was the first online hackathon I attended, and it was my first real exposure to how to build other applications on Ethereum. So, one could say I have gone through a complete "circle"—from grassroots hackathons to community, and most of our work at Gitcoin now revolves around developing the ecosystem through online hack activities.

2. For someone who knows nothing about Gitcoin, could you describe what Gitcoin is? Is it a community, a crowdfunding platform, or a community like GitHub but with funding support? What is Gitcoin bounty?

Scott Moore: The true purpose of Gitcoin is to build a remote, open-source developer community. The bounties, online hackathons, and grants on Gitcoin are certainly attractive to individuals, but we believe Gitcoin is much more than that. If you are working on a web3 project, you want to find ways to tell people what you are doing, the importance of the project, summon other developers to join and participate, and how to make progress as part of the ecosystem. If you are a developer, you want to find and engage with projects that interest you and align with your values. Our platform addresses these needs and simplifies everything. At the same time, we place great importance on the social features of the platform; we want everyone in our community of 40,000 developers to feel welcomed, valued, and closely connected with other community members.

That said, we have indeed focused most of our efforts recently on hackathon projects and bounty programs. Hackathon projects provide a very low barrier to entry into the web3 and blockchain industry, allowing people to clearly understand and try developing different projects. So for those just entering this ecosystem or looking for new things to try, hackathons are a great opportunity. So far, we have hosted over 20 events and distributed nearly $400,000 in prizes to teams from around the world.

On the other hand, bounties are actually provided to those who have already proven their capabilities to the community, and the community wants to support these individuals. With the generous support of the Ethereum Foundation, Gitcoin has provided over $2 million in bounties to projects in the ecosystem. But not all of this money comes from Gitcoin; our bounties use a new crowdfunding method called "quadratic funding," which aims to give everyone in the ecosystem a voice in how to allocate "matching funds." Thus, Gitcoin bounties become a collective activity and a gathering point for the community. If you want to learn more about how this model works, I highly recommend Vitalik's article on quadratic funding. If you are interested in our recent developments, Vitalik's recent comments on Gitcoin Round 5 fifth round funding are also highly recommended.

(Gitcoin Weekly Leaderboard: Top Three Funders)

3. How big is your team now? Why did you decide to create Gitcoin, and what were your initial expectations?

Scott Moore: Gitcoin currently has about 12 people, and the team is still growing! In fact, many of our team members initially joined as Gitcoin community members and have gradually proven their capabilities through the platform and the community itself. We are proud to say that we are dogfooding our own technology—building products ourselves and using them!

In terms of vision, all credit must go to Kevin Owocki (CEO of Gitcoin), as he proposed the necessity of having a better way to build open-source communities, and through his past experience as a development leader in several web2 startups, he discovered the existing solutions lacked appeal to developers. I decided to join the Gitcoin team early on because I found Kevin's ideas not only correct but also that he was the kind of person who could execute quickly and iterate on products rapidly.

Especially the second point is key to Gitcoin's success: for many projects, including web3, the pursuit of perfection is the enemy of product usability and project feasibility; it actually undermines the ability to obtain user feedback that a great product needs.

4. What makes developers wake up in the morning and decide, "I want to develop new products and publish them on Gitcoin"? Additionally, what else can developers do on Gitcoin now?

Scott Moore: Everyone's situation is different, so we don't want to judge how developers should motivate themselves. Generally, people tend to think of bounties and hackathon prizes as external motivators (implying that people rely on this to make money). But it's actually a different way: programmers already have intrinsic motivation; they just don't have the time to focus on open-source projects while doing their regular jobs. Bounties and hackathons give these talented developers an opportunity to apply the technologies they are interested in and receive some funding support to continue doing what they want.

Web3 technology is very advanced, which allows many people to see a fundamentally transformative opportunity to change how the world operates today, whether through DeFi, DAOs, or other new distributed system tools. We try to enable developers to access all these types of projects through our platform and work with over 300 active funders. If a developer is looking for something specific, the easiest way is to search for projects of interest on our bounty explorer or join our upcoming hackathon.

5. What are you currently doing to meet community needs? What is Gitcoin Grants Round 6, and why is it worth participating?

Scott Moore: We have received a lot of great feedback from the community, mainly focused on how we are creating a more interactive social experience, and enhancing user experience has been a high-priority task for us over the past six months. We collect feedback as much as possible and encourage interested individuals to try developing in our GitHub repository. It's important to note that Gitcoin not only supports open-source; we are open-source ourselves.

The upcoming so-called Round 6 of bounties is our sixth quadratic funding round. Our focus is on simplifying the user experience (for example, allowing large grants), ensuring the importance of staged payments to ensure successful projects can plan for the long term (which Vitalik emphasized in previous articles). In addition, all our efforts are aimed at finding more ways to engage everyone in the ecosystem; we hope everyone can participate comprehensively, even if it’s just contributing 2 DAI to a few projects you care about.

6. What will the next version look like? Will there be any new features or plans released?

Scott Moore: Besides what I mentioned above, we hope to make it easier for everyone to work as a team, whether it’s a group of developers self-organizing or an existing core team wanting to attract more people to help. The changes in the new version are relatively simple, generally aimed at improving the remote collaboration experience. We will notify everyone promptly when new features are released!

7. Growth strategies are essential for companies of any size. What is your growth strategy? How did you find the first 100 developers and get them to register and start projects?

Scott Moore: You might not believe it, but it was really simple when we first started. The product idea for the bounty project was initially just a way to help funders post tasks and help developers request work. But this idea resonated strongly in the Ethereum community in 2017, when the community was experiencing rapid growth. The first 100 users are always the hardest; what we did was work very closely with them to ensure we could meet their needs and quickly make corresponding updates.

Now the actual challenge is much greater, as the number of developers is gradually increasing, and the specific number depends on which industry report you look at; some say there are about 10,000 developers on average each month in the ecosystem, while others claim there are 200,000 "active developers." In comparison, over the past six months, we have had about 40,000 developers use Gitcoin, which means a significant number of Ethereum developers are on this platform. Therefore, we focus on how to get more developers into the web3 industry. We have made some significant progress in this area, and we will share these advancements in the coming months, but it can be said that truly engaging with the broader open-source community is a key part of it.

8. What changes do you think we need to make to make blockchain projects more popular? And what role will Gitcoin play in this process?

Scott Moore: Blockchain has a branding problem. It is a technology still in its early stages, so when many people think of blockchain, they think of fraud, poor user experience, or overly zealous evangelists. Gitcoin's role is to bridge the gap between web2 and web3, eliminating these perceptions. We are working hard to fix these bad first impressions (which is one of the main reasons user experience has become a priority for us). Our community is also working hard: some are developing cool, attractive products, while others are addressing user experience, scaling, or previously unaddressed issues. These people are the heroes of web3, and we want to help more of them thrive.

9. With only a few months until the release of Ethereum 2.0, do you think it will elevate your future work and ultimately bring more developers into the blockchain world to develop products on Ethereum?

Scott Moore: I think the Ethereum 2.0 team has done an excellent job facing challenges and solving problems, and I believe their work is very important. That said, Ethereum 2.0 is just one piece of the "puzzle" to attract more developers and more applications. To achieve this and achieve long-term success, I believe we must find more ways to enable ecosystem members to build sustainable business models for their companies (whether or not those models include tokens).

10. Last question, what blockchain-based products are you currently most interested in, and why?

Scott Moore: In the DeFi space and the broader blockchain ecosystem, I can list many names, many of which have appeared in Evan's weekly newsletter -【Weeekly in Ethereum】. But two names stand out particularly in my mind: Our Zora and Foundation, which focus on how to enable creators to get paid. These two projects provide a new way for real-world artists to earn compensation without requiring them to truly understand the fundamentals of blockchain. I think these are the best examples of "where the ecosystem should head." I also want to highly recommend Magic (formerly a wallet solution provider for Ethereum, Fortmatic), which offers a seamless login option that is even better than MetaMask.

For the open-source and blockchain world, Gitcoin is undoubtedly a new "turning point" and a new opportunity. We believe that Gitcoin's success applies not only to blockchain projects but also to general tech startups. When you understand and learn to apply the keys to Gitcoin's success, you can succeed!