Blockchain has the potential to change the way we arrange, record and verify transactions, with the underlying model shifting away from a centralised structure towards decentralised systems. The heart of the blockchain revolution is the blockchain developers who are designing and optimizing blockchain protocols and crafting the architecture of blockchain systems.
In the beginning, the role of blockchain developers was more of a technical one. They where more focused on developing and optimizing blockchain protocols, crafting the architecture of blockchain systems, developing smart contracts etc. As time passed, apart from being a hardcore tech work, blockchain developers gradually started to move towards being a collective and started to form strong communities, participating more in the overall development of various blockchain ecosystems.
In the beginning, most of the blockchain projects where standalone projects where a set of developers were working as a different entity as the skillset needed for one blockchain was not needed for another project. All this changed with the arrival of Ethereum.
Ethereum revolutionised the crypto market with its network that supports the creation of the majority of the altcoin market. While bitcoin was just used as a store of value and to transfer money, Ethereum allows individuals and companies to do much more than just transfer money, rather build and deploy all kinds of decentralized apps.
From its launch in 2015, In less than five years, Ethereum developed into a global network of thousands of connected computers and gave birth to hundreds of developer communities.
Developers find that “contributing to the community” is just as important as “making lots of money” according to a 2018 Evans Data survey. Since Ethereum made it possible to bring all these groups of like-minded people together, communities like ETH Global, DoraHacks etc gave them a collective voice.
VC in Decentraliztion era
As the community started growing, so started the ideas as well, the need for Funds started to rise. Rather than depending on a centralized entity, developer collectives came up with DAO which attempts to decentralize traditional venture capital.
DAO’s are unique for several reasons. First, it’s funded in virtual currency with thousands of anonymous participants and most importantly, the decision process is decentralized with each anonymous investor matters
With the wisdom of the crowd, new tools like HackerLink, GitCoin, quadratic voting, BUIDL, Bounty emerged. All these on-chain governance developer communities stared to revolutionize traditional communities and the existing incubator models.
Among the communities, DoraHacks stood apart. DoraHacks was founded at Tsinghua University in 2014, as the first hacker community in China. By December 2018, DoraHacks’ campaign reached out to more than 300,000 hackers around the world, and more than 15,000 participated in DoraHacks Global Hackathons. DoraHacks now has more than 400 community partners and 150 enterprise partners.
As the year passes on, we can see the wisdom of the crowds can be a successful mechanism for selecting startups from the success story of various Unicorns of Blockchain. With the arrival of projects like Dora Factory, we can see the blockchain developer community will be ready to welcome the new era of unicorn factory.
