Blockchain startup Gitcoin raises $10.42M

LAFAYETTE — Gitcoin Holdings Inc. raised just more than $10.42 million in its first round of funding to scale its marketplace for software developers building open-source projects.

The Lafayette company reported raising the funds from 13 investors in an all-option deal, according to disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday afternoon.

Gitcoin provides a place where developers can fund their software-development projects through crowdsourcing and grants, or by taking on “bounties” where others pay them to build solutions to their problems. All of the software commissioned on the platform is open-source, meaning that anyone can download the software for their own use and modification.

The platform has distributed the equivalent of $18.96 million since its launch in November 2017, with nearly a third of that total distributed in the first quarter of 2021 alone.

The developers are paid in certain types of cryptocurrency, including a currency that’s designed to chain its value to $1 per virtual coin.

Gitcoin’s marketplace is structured in the same way that a blockchain allows users to securely make trades of value without a centralized authority, such as a clearinghouse would in settling the positions of two traders on a stock exchange or a business that would act as an intermediary between a developer and people seeking a specific software solution.

In that sense, Gitcoin could become one way that the blockchain could be used to give knowledge-workers a larger cut of the rewards of performing work, CEO Kevin Owocki said.

“I think that if blockchain is ever going to go mainstream, then … people earning to create financial sovereignty is going to be a huge part of the Internet of Value,” he said. “It’s just I don’t think that anyone knows about it yet.”

Gitcoin employs 10 people directly.

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