Gitopia is the next-generation Code Collaboration Platform powered by blockchain technology and interactive token economy. Gitopia’s mission is to create a new paradigm for open source development and decentralized collaboration where innovators are rewarded, contributors are motivated, and the stakeholders have the power to govern platform policies.

Centralized code collaboration platforms like GitHub exist today largely thanks to the work of a vast community of open source contributors worldwide. The open-source community members ranging from code contributors, users, documentation writers, marketers, designers, user support, and more collaborate and contribute to the collaboration platforms and help build the platform ecosystem.

While there are ways to make money while working in open source, most of these community members perform their duties to keep learning and share their knowledge out of ❤️ for the open-source project and a sense of obligation to the community. However, despite their crucial role in building open-source projects and the platform ecosystem, they are often taken advantage of and do not receive the due recognition and appreciation they deserve for their work. This, when added to the massive amount of work they do and the pressure they are under, has led them to burn out and give up on contributing to open source projects. It’s hard to maintain open-source projects with a lack of equally motivated individuals to support and help share the workload.

Gitopia is working towards fixing this lack of proper incentivization in open-source. Community is the heart of the Gitopia ecosystem, and the platform is designed to incentivize open-source contributions. Gitopia is community-driven, and all participants in the Gitopia ecosystem have the opportunity to shape and improve the Gitopia platform for what’s best for the decentralized and open source community and not for the needs of a few corporations.

Gitopia offers unique incentives for every contribution by the participants in its ecosystem. These incentives are appropriately aligned to motivate contributors and help drive up the innovation and growth of open-source software on the Gitopia platform while ensuring the smooth and efficient running of the ecosystem.

The different participants in the Gitopia ecosystem fall into the categories or roles explained below:

Check out the attached links for a detailed explanation of the incentives, roles, and responsibilities of the various ecosystem participants of Gitopia. Find out the ecosystem participant you resonate most with and the incentives you are expected to gain by participating in the Gitopia ecosystem.

1. Community

A community is a group of individuals that unite around a shared passion and relentless focus to improve outcomes for a particular population. Members of the community commit to sharing data, experience, and skills to design, develop and implement improvements. In Gitopia’s context, the community is the open-source community.

The different kinds of members in an open-source community are explained below:

1. Leader: The leader is the person who is responsible for making the final decision about features, releases, and other activities related to an open-source project.
2. Maintainers: Maintainers are the people responsible for maintaining an open-source project. They direct the orchestra of developers and reviewers, making sure that they perform their tasks efficiently.
3. Contributors: Contributors are the people who contribute code, documentation, etc., to open source projects. They fix bugs and write code to improve open source projects.
4. Citizen developers: Citizen developers are the people who actually use open-source software. They give the project a purpose and help it grow by providing valuable feedback on bugs and feature requests. (read more)

2. Educators and Researchers

Educators are the people who will use Gitopia’s services to shape the next generation of software developers. Educators will use Gitopia to distribute code, gain students’ feedback and collect assignments.

Researchers will find Gitopia to be an invaluable tool to collaborate with learned minds worldwide on research projects. With a lack of censorship and no central control authority making decisions on Gitopia, there will be no barrier stopping them from innovating and collaborating on future technology. Gitopia also provides researchers with permanent storage without a single point of failure, and hence they will not have to worry about ever losing access to their repositories (read more)

3. Organizations, Open Source Foundations, and DAOs(Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)

Organizations are shared accounts where groups of people(Organizations or open-source projects) can collaborate across many projects at once. Organizations simplify the management of group-owned repositories and help plan the workflows for business and large open-source projects with a proper hierarchical model.

Open-source foundations are not-for-profit and charitable organizations supporting the open-source software movement. They help the open-source projects in the form of organizational, legal, or financial support.

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) is an organization that runs through rules encoded as computer programs called smart contracts. The goal of a DAO is to create an organization that can be governed with pre-subscribed rules and without a single human authority. (read more)

4. Validators and Delegators

A validator is a semi-trusted entity responsible for validating and producing blocks. The Gitopia main chain relies on a set of validators to secure the network. The role of validators is to run a full-node and participate in consensus by broadcasting votes which contain cryptographic signatures signed using their private key. Validators commit new blocks in the blockchain and receive revenue in the form of LORE tokens in exchange for their work.

Delegators of the Gitopia ecosystem are holders of LORE tokens, who delegate some or all of their LORE tokens with trusted validators to secure the Gitopia main chain. In return, delegators can earn a proportion of the transaction fees as well as block rewards. (read more)

5. Gitopia Ecosystem Partners

Ecosystem partners are a value-adding network of partners and collaborative organizations who can give an important competitive advantage. Gitopia, in its run, will be onboarding many ecosystem partners to its ecosystem to provide its users with high-value services and capabilities through technology integrations that offer complementary value around the Gitopia platform. (read more)

6. Evangelists(Open-Source and Crypto)

Open source evangelists are the people who are enthusiastic about open source software and work to increase its awareness among users and improve its perception. They communicate the value and benefits of open source software with users to increase adoption and encourage more open source contributions.

Crypto Evangelists/Believers are the people who genuinely believe in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. They do whatever they can to support cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications like participating in discussions online and offline, attending community events, taking part in airdrops, etc. (read more)

A vibrant platform ecosystem and community will be an essential part of Gitopia. The active involvement of all of the above-mentioned ecosystem participants is necessary for the proper functioning of Gitopia and to sustain Gitopia’s platform model. Without them, Gitopia won’t be able to achieve its mission of creating a new paradigm for open source software development and decentralized collaboration where everyone is a stakeholder, innovators are rewarded, contributors are motivated, and users have power.

That is why our team is attempting to correctly align the incentives so that Gitopia can return value to each of those participating in a legitimate and meaningful manner. We at Gitopia believe that the active participation of everyone will help Gitopia develop into the best collaboration platform for all the developers from across the world to come together and build open-source software.

For more details regarding Gitopia, follow us at -

Website: https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A community is a group of individuals that unite around a common passion and relentless focus to improve outcomes for a particular population. Members of a working community commit to sharing data, experience, and skills to design, develop and implement improvements inside and outside the environments they work in.

The communities in the context of Gitopia are the open-source communities. Every open source project has a structure and a governance model to facilitate proper functioning. Depending on their roles and responsibilities, the different members in an open-source project are classified into leaders, maintainers, contributors, and citizen developers.

In some cases, a person may fall into more than one of the above categories; For example, a leader of one open-source project may be a contributor in another project. Similarly, a user/citizen developer of one project may be a leader in another open-source project.

The majority of the participants in the Gitopia ecosystem fall into the four classes of leaders, maintainers, contributors, and citizen developers. Almost every participant in the Gitopia platform will be a contributor or a citizen developer.

Leader

A leader is a person who is responsible for making the final decision about features, releases, and other activities related to an open-source project. In some cases, this is a single person; for example, Linus Torvalds is the original author and has the final say on anything related to the Linux kernel. In other projects, there may be one or more committees responsible for various aspects of a project, like the Core Technical Committee that governs the Node.js project.

The role they play in the Gitopia ecosystem

• A leader would be the person who has the administrator rights of an organization or open-source repository hosted on the Gitopia platform.
• Leaders create new projects or fork existing projects.
• Leaders follow the security policies laid down for the project.
• Leader monitor vulnerabilities and patch them whenever it is needed for the project.
• The leader keeps up with supported versions so that the library is up to date.
• Leader reviews and accepts improvements to the project.
• A leader would be the final decision maker for all matters related to their project.
• Leaders accept proposals, approve PR and reward other users for their contributions in LORE tokens.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Gitopia offers them the ability to attract funding right on the Gitopia platform itself. They can pitch their ideas to the funding organizations and other participants in the Gitopia ecosystem and receive financial support in the form of LORE tokens.
• The leaders can then use the aid received in LORE tokens to fund bounties/issues/proposals to attract code contributions for their projects.
• Another advantage brought by Gitopia to the leaders is making open source licenses more actionable through smart contracts.
• Gitopia also offers them censorship-resistant permanent storage for their repositories.
• Introduce monetization mechanisms or expenditure plans in LORE tokens and make the project sustainable and transparent from day 1.
• Use Gitopia platform services like actionable licenses, static analysis and introduce innovative ways to grow the project.
• Stake LORE tokens to earn rewards and secure the network
• Participate in platform governance.

Maintainers

Maintainers are the people responsible for maintaining an open-source project. Most leaders delegate some of the decisions to people who are responsible for maintaining specific parts of the project, and in large projects, these maintainers may also delegate to people who are responsible for subcomponents of their portion.

A maintainer doesn’t necessarily have to be someone who writes code for your project. It could be someone who’s done a lot of work evangelizing your project or written documentation that made the project more accessible to others. Regardless of what they do day-to-day, a maintainer is probably someone who feels responsibility over the direction of the project and is committed to improving it.

The role they play in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Maintainers on Gitopia will track ongoing work on their projects and make sure that it gets reviewed and merged in a timely manner.
• They will direct the orchestration of developers and reviewers, making sure that they connect to each other appropriately, often serving as dispatchers.
• The maintainer manages a timely response to queries related to the project or directs the users in the correct direction. They are often the first person a new contributor meets.
• The maintainer answers questions related to the contribution, getting started, or direct them to the forum for further queries or even find help for harder problems.
• Maintainers encourage a friendly working environment for developers, check and update issue trackers, encourage developers to review the code before merging, and allow excellent reviewers to maintain the project.
• Maintainers also take ownership of final responsibility. If no reviewer can be found for an important contribution, they review. If no developer can be found to fix an important bug, they develop.
• Maintainers also help in running activities like code fest, bug bounties to attract more contributors to the project.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• The incentives provided by Gitopia for the leaders, as pointed out in the previous section, are applicable for the maintainers too.
• By funding bounties, issues, and proposals on Gitopia with LORE tokens, maintainers can easily attract more code contributions to their project and form an active developer community surrounding it.
• Stake or delegate LORE tokens to earn rewards and secure the network

Contributors

Contributors are the people who contribute to open-source projects with code, documentation, and other contributions. The code contributions are usually subject to review from the maintainer before they are included in the open-source project’s repository.

A contributor could be anyone who comments on an issue or pull request, people who add value to the project (whether it’s triaging issues, writing code, or organizing events), or anybody with a merged pull request.

The role they play in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Contributors fix bugs or create new features for open source projects hosted on Gitopia.
• A contributor comments on an issue or pull request and add value to the project
• A contributor points out a bug or even sends pull requests that fixes it.
• Send proposals for any improvement in the project.
• Contributors can also pick issues to work on and make contributions to any projects on Gitopia.
• Contributors write code and docs and generally are the agents of change in an open-source project.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• To motivate developers to contribute their valuable time and write code for open source projects, Gitopia will reward their contributions with LORE tokens through its open-source incentivization mechanism.
• Stake LORE tokens to earn rewards and secure the network
• Participate in platform governance.

Citizen Developers

The most important group of people in an open-source project is likely to be the ones who actually use the product. They might use the software or use the source code of the project for learning purposes.

The role they play in the Gitopia ecosystem

• They give the projects a purpose and help them grow.
• They identify new features needed in open-source projects.
• These valuable members of the community can provide feedback about features, bug reports, and more. This helps ensure that the product is of increasingly good quality.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Due to the incentives provided by Gitopia to the open-source developers, users/citizen developers will likely find better-maintained projects with faster bug fixes on Gitopia.
• They can use Gitopia to show their appreciation for the work done on their favorite open source projects by donating LORE tokens to them right on the Gitopia platform.
• Use LORE tokens for using paid subscriptions or other monetization mechanisms implemented by a project, if any.
• Stake LORE tokens to earn rewards and secure the network
• Participate in platform governance.
• Earn bounties and other incentives offered by Gitopia.

The community is one of the things that can make or break an open-source project, and having a strong, vibrant, and diverse open source community is important to the project’s success. All of the people in the roles listed above are part of this community, along with people filling other critical roles in the project for documentation, marketing, user support, and so much more.

The above blog explains the roles and responsibilities of the various members of the community and the incentives offered to them by the Gitopia ecosystem.

Click here to know about the other ecosystem participants, their incentives, and roles performed by them in the Gitopia ecosystem.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem: Community was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evangelists are the people who act as a bridge between a product’s users and its developers. An Evangelist’s primary goal is to excite the technology they believe in to establish a critical mass of users. They are the most organic growth hackers. In principle, they work to raise awareness about a given technology and build a community of users that also love that technology. Once there is a critical mass of users, the evangelist works further to establish their technology as an industry standard by moving to larger and larger accounts.

Evangelists come from a wide range of backgrounds. Some people have a marketing background with a strong interest in technology. Some are developers who like talking to users. And some evangelists are people who have in-depth knowledge about a software product from the user’s point of view. Whatever their background, they have a common goal: to do what they can to increase the awareness of the product they believe in among people and increase its adoption.

Among the participants of the Gitopia ecosystem, there are two significant kinds of evangelists:

Open source Evangelists

Open source evangelists are the people who are enthusiastic about open source software and work to increase its awareness among users and improve its perception. They communicate the value and benefits of open source software with users to increase adoption and encourage more open source contributions.

Crypto Evangelists

Crypto Evangelists or Believers, as they are commonly known, are the people who genuinely believe in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. They look forward to seeing a time when digital currency and Decentralized applications replace their counterparts and become mainstream.

Believers look beyond the price of a cryptocurrency and focus on the future of blockchain, believing that it’s a technology that will revolutionize virtually all industries. Many blockchain believers don’t trust centralized institutions and often feel that centralized institutions mean centralized power that will be wielded against the people over the long run. They believe that tools are needed to protect people against the dominance of these centralized institutions. For believers, the key to a healthy system lies in decentralizing power, which often means access to data in the current information age.

The role played by open-source/crypto evangelists

• Open source and Crypto evangelists engage in communities, both offline and online, about open-source software, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology.
• They help evaluate, educate and increase adoption of various open-source software, cryptocurrency, and decentralized applications.
• Open source and Crypto evangelists help spread knowledge about open source and cryptocurrency respectively by writing educational articles and also help attract more contributions.
• They contribute to open-source software by writing code, helping with documentation, marketing, etc.
• Evangelists collect feedback from users and make sure that the maintainers of the open-source projects get to know what problems users have with their software and what new features they need.
• Crypto evangelists understand what cryptocurrencies are for and strive to learn the technology that powers them, even if it requires technical knowledge.
• Crypto evangelists accept cryptocurrencies as payment in their businesses and use crypto in everyday transactions to encourage others to do the same.
• Believers take part in community events and token airdrops of various cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications.
• Both Open source and Crypto evangelists plan bounties to promote the development of new features in different open-source software and decentralized applications respectively.

The above article explains the roles and responsibilities of open source and crypto evangelists in the Gitopia ecosystem and their incentives.

Click here to know about the other ecosystem participants, their incentives, and roles performed by them in the Gitopia ecosystem.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem: Open-Source and Crypto Evangelists was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ecosystem partners are a value-adding network of partners and collaborative organizations who can give an important competitive advantage. Gitopia, in its run, will be onboarding many ecosystem partners to its ecosystem to provide its users with high-value services and capabilities through technology integrations that offer complementary value around the Gitopia platform.

Ecosystem partners perform various functions. Some ecosystem partners will form the distribution network for Gitopia’s products and services. They will be essential to a successful sales and marketing strategy, as the distribution network lends massive scale to any fast-growing technology provider. At the same time, the other ecosystem partners are technology providers whose products can be integrated into Gitopia. Ecosystem partners are essential to Gitopia’s product and market strategy because they allow us to capture and enter new adjacent markets without investing heavily in new product developments for those markets.

The different kinds of ecosystem partners that Gitopia will onboard to its ecosystem are -

• Co-Marketing Partners: They are the partners who will market different solutions to the same customer base. Co-marketing partners can work together to attract users to both products.
• Platform Extenders/Third Party Application Developers: These are add-ons or plug-in providers who build applications on top of Gitopia. They help extend the functionality of Gitopia, increase the value of the platform to end-users, and form a solid base of support for Gitopia.
• Referrers: Vendors or VARs who do not distribute a vendor’s product directly but can refer their customers to the vendor.
• Implementation Tools Providers: These are software vendors specializing in “tools” that help customers better use the Gitopia code collaboration platform. They will add value to Gitopia and enhance its reach and competitive advantage in the market.
• Strategic Technology Integration Partner: Another vendor whose technology can benefit from deep integration with the Gitopia platform to strengthen both products’ features and competitiveness.
• Joint Product Strategy Partner: These are technology vendors with whom your company can jointly develop and market a unique product to capture a specific market segment of customers that have unmet needs the product makes addressable.
• Community Partners: These partners will help increase the adoption of Gitopia by spreading awareness about Gitopia in their community. Partner with other organizations to support social causes and missions like COVID-19, wildfires, Natural disasters, etc.
• Cryptocurrency and Decentralized projects: To run a sustainable decentralized infrastructure we need partners who can directly integrate their blockchain with Gitopia and offer developers services for developments. These projects will help in Gitopia adoption via one of the above methods mentioned in the list.
• Liquidity partners and exchanges: These partners help the ecosystem by providing liquidity to encash the rewarded contributions. These will be market makers, public exchanges, and Dex.
• Certification partners: Certification authorities are universities and institutions working with Gitopia, validating the users participating in different activities.
• Legal and licenses Lack of actionable licenses is one of the problems being solved by Gitopia. To make this successful Gitopia will partner, onboard, or hire the resources needed for making Licenses more actionable and valid in legal structures.

Gitopia has set aside a portion of its LORE tokens in its Token economics model to incentivize new partners to join the Gitopia ecosystem and grow their businesses with Gitopia. Whether you are building solutions that integrate with Gitopia or services that help customers reach their full potential, partners are welcome to join the Gitopia ecosystem and avail incentives. More information on this will be revealed in a future blog.

Gitopia invites partners to build their businesses on the Gitopia platform, integrate services with Gitopia and extend the functionality of the Gitopia code collaboration platform.

Click here to know about the other ecosystem participants, their incentives, and roles performed by them in the Gitopia ecosystem.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem: Ecosystem Partners was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A central facet of any blockchain is its consensus mechanism. Consensus refers to how all the stakeholders in a decentralized network agree on the validity of shared data (typically some kind of transaction, but not always) and secure that data on the blockchain. Consensus must be achieved before a blockchain network can move on and process new transactions. Proof of Stake (PoS) is an algorithm employed by cryptocurrency protocols to reach a consensus. In PoS blockchains, an individual or group is algorithmically chosen to verify transactions with computer hardware based on the tokens they have staked or locked up in the network as a form of collateral.

The Gitopia main chain is powered by the Tendermint delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm. It is secured in a permissionless manner by a globally distributed set of validators.

In dPoS networks such as Gitopia, the network is only as resilient as the strength of its validators/stakers. The lower the overall number of a network’s tokens staked, the higher the surface for attacks like double spends, and parallel chains/forks to occur. While this will always be a viable attack vector for all networks with both small and large market caps, the smaller networks are the most susceptible especially in their early years of growth as the cost to attack them is much lower in their initial stages.

Due to the above reasons, it is quite important for us to understand more about validators and delegators and their role in securing the Gitopia ecosystem.

Staking

Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset (LORE in the case of Gitopia) to provide economic security for a public blockchain. Public blockchains are permissionless networks, meaning anyone is free to participate in maintaining them. As a result, it would be possible for some of the network maintainers (called validators) to act maliciously. To ensure that the maintainers behave in the network’s best interest, the locked-up assets are at risk of being partially slashed (destroyed) if there is evidence that a fault was committed.

Due to practical constraints of the software, the number of validators on Gitopia has to be capped. This restriction does not mean those LORE token holders who do not operate as validators themselves can’t participate in securing the network. In fact, LORE tokens are designed to let each holder participate in securing the network using a mechanism called delegation. When LORE holders stake their LORE tokens, they must choose one or more validators to delegate to. The delegators are then eligible for receiving rewards but are also at risk of slashing, if the validators they choose, misbehave.

Validators

A validator is a semi-trusted entity responsible for validating and producing blocks. The Gitopia main chain relies on a set of validators to secure the network. Validators secure the Gitopia main chain by validating and relaying transactions, proposing, verifying, and finalizing blocks. By performing those tasks, they earn LORE tokens as a reward. In the case of block provisioning, the reward comes from the tokens newly minted on that block. Validators must also participate in governance by voting on proposals. Validators are weighted according to their total stake. Validators can stake their own LORE tokens or delegate tokens of other stakeholders.

Roles and Responsibilities of Validators:

• Run a full node and participate in consensus by broadcasting votes which contain cryptographic signatures signed by their private key.
• Validators commit new blocks in the blockchain and receive block rewards in exchange for their work.
• Validators must be able to run the correct version of the software constantly. They need to ensure that their servers are always online and their private keys are not compromised.
• Validators must actively participate in platform governance.
• Validators are expected to be active members of the community.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Validators earn newly minted LORE tokens for provisioning new blocks.
• They will also earn a transaction fee for processing transactions on the Gitopia platform.
• Validators can earn a percentage of rewards as commission when they stake LORE tokens delegated to them by LORE token holders.
• Validators can vote on all the platform-related decisions and shape the future of Gitopia.

Delegators

Delegators of the Gitopia ecosystem are holders of LORE tokens, who use some or all of their LORE tokens to secure the Gitopia main chain. There is no minimum amount of LORE tokens required to stake tokens. Delegators help secure the Gitopia main chain by selecting one or more validators and delegating their voting power to them by putting up LORE tokens as collateral. In return, delegators can earn a proportion of the transaction fees as well as block rewards.

Validators never obtain custody of the LORE tokens delegated to them. Thus, there is no risk for delegators of their LORE tokens being stolen by validators. However, there is a risk for delegated LORE to be slashed.

The role they play in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Help in securing the chain by staking LORE tokens
• Participate in Network governance
• Actively monitor the validators with whom they have staked their tokens and switch to another validator if they are unsatisfied.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Delegators can earn a share of validator rewards by delegating their tokens to any of the network’s validators. The percentage of the revenue allocated to token holders will be proportional to the number of tokens staked.
• Delegators can vote on all the platform-related decisions and shape the future of Gitopia.

Slashing:

Slashing is an event, which results in a loss of stake percentage, depending on the type of network violation and jeopardizing the safety of other participants. Therefore, it represents not only a financial incentive to act properly but also is a measure to prevent nothing at stake problem.

Gitopia is a complex ecosystem where LORE tokens act not only as an economic incentive but also represent a governance unit playing a crucial role in ecosystem security. In that way, slashing becomes a tool that influences voting power distribution.

Besides, it affects the authority of caught fraudulent participants, motivates validators to improve their infrastructure, and in the case of delegators, to do due diligence and diversification amongst validators. Slashing also acts as a decentralization mechanism motivating re-delegate LORE tokens to more reliable or even smaller validators with equal security and infrastructure set up.

Slashing Events:

If a validator misbehaves, their delegated stake will be partially slashed. There are currently two faults that can result in slashing of funds for a validator and their delegators:

• Double signing: Double signing can cause a double-spend or chain fork. The wrong setup of the validator’s infrastructure or key compromise are the most common occasions that cause this type of slashing. If someone reports on chain A that a validator signed two blocks at the same height on chain A and chain B, and if chain A and chain B share a common ancestor, then this validator will get slashed by 5% on chain A. The validator also loses the right to propose blocks and earn rewards without the ability to un-jail. All delegators of this validator enter the unbonding period, which lasts 21 days.
• Downtime: Downtime occurs when the validator is offline and does not participate in block commitment signing less than 5% of the blocks in a row of 10000. This situation leads to a loss of 0.01% stake not only for validators but also for bonded delegators. In addition, the validator drops out of the consensus and does not earn block rewards for at least 10 minutes. After fixing the issues, the validator can re-join the validators set by sending an un-jail transaction.

Slashing also affects LORE tokens, which were in the unbonding phase when one of these events happened.

The above article is a brief introduction to the staking mechanism used to secure the Gitopia main chain. Also explained above are the roles and responsibilities of validators and delegators in the Gitopia ecosystem and the incentives offered to them.

Click here to know about the other ecosystem participants, their incentives, and roles performed by them in the Gitopia ecosystem.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem: Validators/Delegators and staking was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Organizations, Open source foundations, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations(DAO) are the different types of organizations that will be a part of the Gitopia ecosystem.

A decade ago, an organization was typically managed and handled by a firm and structured hierarchical setup. Traditional or Centralised organizations rely on one individual to make decisions and provide direction for the whole group. A clear chain of command travels from the top to the bottom through the levels of their hierarchical organizational structure.

Over the years, with the development of blockchain technology, this has changed drastically with a new form of organization where the functioning of the organization is based on consensus among its members known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations(DAO). A DAO is an organization governed by rules that are encoded as transparent, immutable computer code influenced by shareholders and not a centralized body.

These organizations allow the users of Gitopia to manage their project repositories in different ways. Projects and communities could either use the traditional hierarchical organization structure or have a DAO manage their project repositories.

Open-source foundations are organizations devoted to the advocacy, legal aid, financial aid, technical assistance, governance, etc., of free and open-source software (FOSS) as a whole or of one or more specific FOSS projects. For projects that have their own foundation or are part of an umbrella organization, the primary goal is often to provide a mechanism for funding the development of the software. For the most part, these organizations are structured as nonprofit/charity organizations.

Organizations

Organizations are shared accounts where a group of people(businesses or open-source projects) can collaborate across many projects at once. Owners and administrators of organizations can manage member access to the organization’s data and projects with sophisticated security and administrative features. Organizations simplify the management of group-owned repositories and help plan the workflows for business and large open-source projects.

Gitopia will be providing its users with the ability to create organizations on its collaboration platform without any limit on the number of collaborators and repositories. Creating an organization helps you centralize your organization’s code and organizational structure. Any owner of an organization can edit that organization’s settings and manage the permissions for each member. This will allow groups of people to collaborate across many organization projects at the same time with a proper hierarchical management system managing the work done by each member.

Open Source Foundations

Open-source foundations are not-for-profit and charitable organizations supporting the open-source software movement. They help the open-source projects in the form of organizational, legal, or financial support. These organizations are one of the main reasons why open-source software development is growing and thriving in the software world. These organizations provide the much-needed help to open source contributors and motivate them to contribute to open-source projects.

The role they play in the Gitopia ecosystem

• Open source organizations and foundations will provide organizational, legal, or financial aid to the open-source projects on the Gitopia platform.
• They can actively monitor the work being done by the open-source projects they fund on the Gitopia platform.

Incentives to participate in the Gitopia ecosystem

• With Gitopia, the open-source organizations can directly fund projects in LORE tokens without any middle man collecting fees. With Gitopia, except for a negligible transaction fee, all of the funds sent by the organizations will go directly into the hands of the leader or maintainer of the open-source projects.
• Organizations can also use Gitopia to create bounties for new features they want or vulnerabilities they want to solve in open-source software. The fund will be locked at first, and only when the bounty gets completed will the reward be released to the developer.
• Nearly all decentralized networks reserve a certain portion of their tokens to incentivize community-based development. The integration of Gitopia with the Cosmos IBC layer (Inter Blockchain communication) offers these decentralized networks a cross-chain payment channel (secured by the Cosmos Hub) that these networks can utilize to fund bounties, issues, and proposals on Gitopia.

Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO)

A decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) is an organization that is run through rules encoded as computer programs called smart contracts. The goal of a DAO is to create an organization that can function without “human” hierarchical management.

In theory, any interaction between humans and organizations can be expressed as a contract. The goal is to be able to automate all management and administrative functions.

DAOs provide an operating system for people and institutions that do not know nor trust each other, who might live in different geographical areas, speak different languages, and therefore be subject to different jurisdictions. Instead of legal contracts managing the relations of the people, with DAOs, all agreements are in the form of open-source code that is self-enforced by the majority consensus of all network actors. DAOs do not have a hierarchical structure, except for the code. Once deployed, this entity is independent of its creator and cannot be censored by one single entity but instead by a predefined majority of the organization’s participants. The exact majority rules are defined in the consensus protocol or the smart contract and will vary from use case to use case.

Gitopia will be providing its users with the ability to have a DAO manage their open-source projects and repositories. This will allow a group of people to work on a project without much worry since there will be an impartial DAO watching over the work done by each member.

Click here to know about the other ecosystem participants, their incentives, and roles performed by them in the Gitopia ecosystem.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem: Organizations, Open Source Foundations, and DAOs was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The various features of Gitopia like Decentralized Governance, Censorship Resistance, and Permanent Storage for repositories make it the best place for educators and researchers to collaborate with others in their field worldwide. They don’t have to worry about an external entity controlling who they can collaborate with or what they can share on the platform.

With countries increasingly building firewalls to censor content on the internet and banning internet services that do not comply with government regulations, it will be challenging for educators and researchers to teach or research things impartially on the internet. Gitopia provides them with a safe haven away from all the censorship and control to do their job without worry and help in their collaborations.

The number of users in centralized code collaboration platforms identifying themselves as educators and researchers has been increasing over the years. More and more people have started using collaboration platforms to work on various projects other than programming in online communities. According to the 2020 Octoverse report, 23% of GitHub users were students and teachers who use it for educational purposes, 10% of GitHub user profiles were categorized as data, and around 6% GitHub users were scientists who used it for research-related purposes.

The rise in the numbers is expected to continue into the future as educators and researchers expand on the foundations they have built. Incentives tailored for them are essential to boost this growth and build a better future together.

Educators

Educators are the people who provide instruction or education. They are the people who will use Gitopia’s services to shape the next generation of software developers. They can use the Gitopia platform to distribute code, gain students’ feedback and collect assignments. In the post covid world, with the increased importance of online classes, a platform to collaborate and interact with students without many restrictions is crucial.

Educators can use Gitopia for the following purposes:

• Host code repositories on which students can practice programming in various programming languages.
• Store the assignments and submissions of students on Gitopia repositories.
• Store the lesson plans and course materials on Gitopia, which can be used by students worldwide.
• Universities and schools around the world can use Gitopia repositories to store the assignments and submissions of all students efficiently.

As the Gitopia platform grows and hosts an extensive collection of open source code, it will become an invaluable educational resource for programmers. With the archives of various revisions of code on Gitopia, programmers can follow the development of a particular piece of software and see how it all came together. This can make Gitopia an irreplaceable teaching tool.

Researchers

Researchers will find Gitopia to be an invaluable tool to collaborate with learned minds worldwide on research projects. They can use Gitopia to collaborate on research papers and use Gitopia to collaborate on custom scripts for data collection and statistical analysis. With a lack of censorship and no central controlling authority making decisions on Gitopia, there will be no barrier stopping them from innovating and developing the software of tomorrow together.

Gitopia does not have a single point of failure, and hence there will be no disruption in services. Researchers will not have to worry about losing access to their repositories, like how many Iranian researchers lost access to their accounts when GitHub blocked their accounts due to US trade sanctions.

• Researchers can use Gitopia to store their research work securely.
• Academic institutions worldwide can use Gitopia to collaborate on research.
• Repositories can store research papers on various topics, which can be a great source of knowledge for students and researchers worldwide.
• Researchers can use Gitopia to attract funding for their work directly on Gitopia in LORE tokens.

The above article explains the roles and responsibilities of educators and researchers in the Gitopia ecosystem and their incentives.

Click here to know about the other ecosystem participants, their incentives, and roles performed by them in the Gitopia ecosystem.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem: Educators and Researchers was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last September, we launched the first iteration of Gitopia's Testnet, giving users a sneak peek into Gitopia — a decentralized code collaboration platform for Web3. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we'd like to thank everyone for their feedback!

Gitopia’s MVP Testnet version has hosted over 26,000+ unique addresses on its network, creating over 27,000+ repositories and helping us test out the platform for bugs and security issues. The Gitopia Testnet has to date, mined over 3M+ blocks with 126,000+ transactions.

Thank you for helping us test and refine Gitopia during this phase! Having your input has been very important to us, and we hope to bring you the platform you deserve in the future.

Today, we are excited to introduce the next milestone in Gitopia’s roadmap: Gitopia Janus Testnet. The Gitopia Janus Testnet will include a variety of features that will make hosting projects on Gitopia and collaborating on them with developers worldwide a lot easier.

The highlighting features getting released in the Janus Testnet are:

* Collaboration workflows - fork, pull request, merges, issue and diff

* Releases — A workflow for shipping software to the end-user

* DAO at Gitopia — A one-click solution to create actionable value-driven DAOs for your opensource and #web3 projects

* Ledger Hardware Wallet and Keplr Wallet Extension support

Shortly after Janus testnet launch, we will be announcing details of an incentivization mechanism that has been designed to bootstrap the Gitopia Ecosystem and onboard early stakeholders such as validators, developers, and ecosystem partners to the platform. A significant portion of the genesis supply of Gitopia’s native token, $LORE, will be distributed to the community via this incentivization mechanism.

We have many more features, programs, rewards, and incentives planned for the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned to our community channels to get intimated.

What is Gitopia?

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivization.

Gitopia provides developers with a community-governed decentralized platform where they can host their git repositories permanently and collaborate with others on code without worrying about getting censored or losing access to their code. Gitopia also leverages open source incentivization to reward open-source contributions and help maintainers sustain their open-source projects.

Gitopia Janus Testnet

The Gitopia Janus Testnet heralds a new stage in Gitopia's evolution, featuring collaboration features that enable users to share and collaborate on code. We named the testnet after Janus — the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and endings — because we hope it will encourage projects to move to Decentralized collaboration platforms, kickstarting the end of domination by Centralized code collaboration platforms and beginning of a Decentralized era.

With the Janus Testnet, we're introducing many new features that will make it easier for teams and organizations(DAO) to host their projects on Gitopia and efficiently collaborate on them with developers worldwide.

Let's take a closer look at the highlighting features of the Gitopia Janus Testnet.

Collaborative Workflows

The primary purpose of a Code Collaboration Platform is to host your repositories and enable you to collaborate with other users on various projects. The first iteration of Gitopia's Testnet allowed users to do the former easily but lacked various functionalities to do the latter effectively.

This testnet helps fix this problem by introducing various collaborative workflows like Issues, Forks, Pull requests, and Diffs. These features will enable developers to collaborate with their teams worldwide seamlessly.

Issues

Issues are a great way to keep track of tasks, enhancements, and bugs for your projects. They're kind of like email — except they can be shared and discussed with the rest of your team. You can use Gitopia issues to plan work within teams and, for many other purposes, customize them to your needs and workflow. You can use Gitopia Issues to:

• Discuss the implementation of an idea.
• Track tasks and work status.
• Accept feature proposals, questions, support requests, or bug reports.
• Elaborate on code implementations.

Forks

A fork is a copy of a repository that you manage. Forking is a way of copying a project's repository and using it as a basis for your own project. Forks on Gitopia will allow developers to experiment with changes without affecting the original project. You also can fetch updates from or submit changes to the original repository with pull requests.

Pull Requests

A pull request (often shortened to PR) is a mechanism for submitting changes to the source code of a software project. It allows developers to submit changes to the repository of another project, intending to review and possibly integrate those changes into the original project's codebase.

Pull requests let you tell others about changes you've pushed to a branch in a repository on Gitopia. Once a pull request is opened, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before your changes are merged into the base branch. Pull Requests has its own section in every repository on Gitopia.

Diffs

Diff is the difference in changes between two commits or saved changes. Gitopia will let you optionally visualize code changes in a side-by-side or split view. This may help you grasp how code has evolved over time and can also help visualize your changes when working collaboratively.

When you use a pull request, you can see what will be changed in the repository by viewing the diff between the incoming request and the base repository.

Releases

One of the most important parts of the software development life cycle is delivering your software to those who use it. Introducing Releases, a workflow for shipping software to end-users.

Releases are packaged versions of your software, along with release notes and links to binary files that you can make available for a broader audience to download and use. You can think of it as a replacement for using downloads to provide software.

It is recommended to version or tag your releases with a changelog that reflects the breaking changes between releases. It gives you the ability to look back at a previous version of your software versus the latest release.

Introducing DAOs at Gitopia— A one-click solution to create actionable DAOs

A DAO, or "Decentralized Autonomous Organization," is a community-led entity with no central authority. It is fully autonomous and transparent: smart contracts lay the foundational rules, execute the agreed-upon decisions, and at any point, proposals, voting, and even the very code itself can be publicly audited.

Ultimately, a DAO is governed entirely by its individual members who collectively make critical decisions about the project's future, such as technical upgrades.

The DAO model at Gitopia is a tool for communities to measure and reward value creation.

DAOs at Gitopia would provide a decentralized code management tool for people and institutions that do not know nor trust each other. It would rely on code instead of admins to allow developers to define the rules around codebases in a way that minimizes the need for trust. With DAOs at Gitopia, teams have access to an auditable and transparent history of repositories which are monitored by a programmed set of rules that is self-enforced by the majority consensus of all network actors and not a single admin.

A DAO opens up the floor to the wider community through proposals and request-for-comments. The purpose, resource requirements, key stakeholders, performance metrics, and actual results of an initiative are made transparent — creating accountability and a social layer of checks and balances. Decentralization doesn't mean being leaderless. Instead, more people are empowered to take initiatives towards shared goals.

While many of the responsibilities of the DAO model at Gitopia overlap with those of traditional organizations, the core difference (and value proposition) is the opportunity to grow the ecosystem and develop meaningful relationships with contributors in the early era.

More details on the DAOs at Gitopia will be released shortly.

Meanwhile, you can create your DAO on Gitopia with one single step by following the docs

Gitopia adds Support for Ledger Hardware Wallet and Keplr Extention Wallet

Gitopia users can now secure their Gitopia Wallet private keys using their Ledger Hardware Wallets. This means you can now have an additional layer of security for your assets when using Gitopia as your private keys now never even touch your computer.

The Ledger device acts as an enclave for your cryptocurrency private keys and other data — including the seed used to generate new addresses — and the process of signing a transaction takes place within it. No private information ever leaves the Ledger device.

Keplr is an open-source browser extension wallet that supports the Cosmos interchain ecosystem. It provides functionalities for account and wallet management for all Cosmos-SDK-based blockchains.

In Keplr, the private keys are stored locally. This removes the friction and risk of web pages having to manage user private keys safely and securely. As the user's private key is not managed by the website, users do not have to worry about the level of security of the website. The user only has to trust the security guarantees of Keplr and freely interact with various web applications as they wish.

Check out the Gitopia documentation to learn how to use Ledger or Keplr Extension Wallet to interact with Gitopia.

Getting started with Gitopia

To enable you to dive in quickly, we advise starting with our documentation section. Just go to "Getting Started" and try it yourself!

Here are some resources to help you get started with Gitopia:

• Website
• Testnet
• Whitepaper
• Documentation
• Gitopia Official Youtube Channel

Why should you be an early adopter at Gitopia Janus Testnet?

Gitopia's mission is to create a new paradigm for open-source software development and decentralized collaboration where everyone is a stakeholder, innovators are rewarded, contributors are motivated, and users have power.

With the cutting-edge code collaboration platform, Gitopia offers unique incentives for every participant's contribution to the ecosystem. These incentives are appropriately aligned to motivate contributors and help drive up the innovation and growth of open-source software on the Gitopia platform while ensuring the smooth and efficient running of the ecosystem.

An important thing to note is that the major portion of the genesis distribution of LORE(Gitopia’s native utility token) will be distributed to the community through a crowd distribution model. This decision was taken in order to onboard more participants in the network ahead of the launch and also make sure that the early tokens go to the contributors who can help Gitopia ecosystem grow.

We will soon announce an incentivization mechanism on Janus Testnet for the community. The incentivization mechanism will hold rewards for Developers, Validators, DAOs, and Organizations to earn points which would later be converted to $LORE on genesis.

If you are a Validator or DAO and want to be part of the early stages of Gitopia and the Janus Testnet, talk to us by filling out these forms:

Validators: https://airtable.com/shrMQFJxcsMD0XV2M

DAOs: https://airtable.com/shrpHNwb1XiMf0s9b

Along with the incentivization mechanism, there would be suits of different activities for the community to participate in and earn points for the genesis rewards.

To know how developers, validators, DAOs, and organizations can benefit from using Gitopia, check out our previous blog — Demystifying Gitopia Ecosystem.

More information on how to earn LORE tokens and detailed information about the various activities planned will be released in subsequent blogs.

Stay tuned to know more!

Bug Reports

This is a beta release. Bugs can happen. Report the bugs by creating issues in the Gitopia repository. Please make sure to add appropriate labels like #bug, #enhancement, etc while posting. Create the issues by following the link below:

https://gitopia.com/gitopia1dlpc7ps63kj5v0kn5v8eq9sn2n8v8r5z9jmwff

Call for Feedback

We are always looking for feedback to improve Gitopia. Help us build the best possible product and tell us how you liked Gitopia & what we can improve:

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord: https://discord.gg/K4aHujXx

Forum: https://forum.gitopia.com/

Follow us

Website: https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Forum: https://forum.gitopia.com/

Introducing Gitopia Janus Testnet was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A total of 3,250,000 LORE tokens minted and unlocked at genesis will be rewarded to the community via The Game Of $LORE incentivization mechanism

Congratulations to the community on the launch of the Gitopia Janus Testnet!

To mark this occasion, we’re kicking off ‘The Game of $LORE’, an incentivization mechanism that rewards participants with points based on their contributions. These points will determine the number of LORE tokens to be rewarded to the participant at the Mainnet.

Gitopia envisions developing into a platform where user concerns and experiences matter, openness, and transparency exist naturally with its community-driven governance approach.

To make this a reality, we need to onboard core ecosystem builders and developers to the platform ahead of the launch. This approach will ensure that early platform participants have enough stakes to drive the governance process that helps the Gitopia ecosystem grow.

The Game of $LORE is built to:

• Bootstrap Gitopia ecosystem and onboard early stakeholders such as validators, developers, and Open-source/ Web3/DAO projects to the platform
• Airdrop Open-source and Web3 communities to migrate and onboard to Gitopia
• Reward developers and teams helping in building Gitopia

A total of 3,250,000 / 7,750,000(Around 42%) minted and unlocked at genesis will be rewarded to the community via The Game Of $LORE incentivization mechanism.

The Game of $LORE — Points and Reward distribution

The reward pool of 3,250,000 LORE tokens would be distributed in 3 major categories:

• Validators— 1,000,000 LORE tokens have been reserved for distribution through rewards and allocations(delegation) to the Validators participating in Janus Testnet.
• Contribution rewards — 1,250,000 LORE tokens have been reserved for this activity. This activity is designed to reward meaningful contributions to Gitopia. Since the definition of real is subjective, we will reward:

* All the contributions on the verified open-source and Web3 projects migrating to Gitopia on Janus Testnet.

* The DAO or other projects that get significant contributions from developers. 

* Developers or teams that are building Gitopia. 

• Airdrop to the community— 1,000,000 LORE tokens airdrop is planned for the developers and contributors in web3 and opensource communities. The airdrop will only be approved after a proposal in the community is thoroughly discussed and passed.

We have unlocked a few activities at the launch of Janus Testnet to enable early contribution rewards. Throughout the Janus Testnet, we will be announcing multiple contests for validators, developers, and other ecosystem participants. These contests will allow community members to earn additional rewards for their contributions other than the ones mentioned in this blog.

Validators — Points and Rewards Distribution

Gitopia aims to provide the highest standards in network infrastructure security, intuitive usability, and community engagement from validators. The reward mechanism will help battle test Gitopia infrastructure and relayers.

The Validators will get HUB points for their contributions which would later be converted to LORE tokens based on the formula below:

Total validator pool available : 1,000,000 LORE tokens

Total Number of LORE token rewards at Genesis =

(HUB Points accumulated by a validator / Total number of HUB points accumulated by all the validators) * Tokens pool reserved for this activity ;[Max. 10,000 LORE tokens]

The validator pool is further divided into two reward pools:

Reward Pool 1: Onboarding and Validating Janus Testnet — 100,000 LORE

To start winning points, validator whitelisting is needed. Following are the processes to increase your chances of whitelisting to become a validator:

Follow the step to participate as a validator on Janus Testnet: 

* Setup the validator on Gitopia follow the steps -> Setup the validator steps

* Submit the form for validators-https://airtable.com/shrMQFJxcsMD0XV2M

Points for validators

Eligibility and rules:

1. To receive rewards, the validator needs to validate at least 1/3 period of the Testnet. 

2. The rewards will be distributed to validators based on the points, and the pool for the maximum pool size is 100,000 LORE tokens. 

3. Additional tasks and rewards can be added to the validator pool during the Janus Testnet. 

4. A whale cap of 10,000 LORE tokens per address during the Janus Testnet. 

5. Any additional amount remaining from the reward pool one will be added to the reward pool 2. 

Reward Pool 2: Delegations and builders rewards to the validators — 900,000 LORE

Along with the onboarding rewards, validators would also have an opportunity to earn rewards by contributing in building the Gitopia network with the team and demonstrating exceptional contributions during the testnet phase. The rewards would be given with the community vote.

Any remaining amount from this pool will be delegated to the validators at the genesis.

All pool's final allocation and delegation will be announced and distributed at the Mainnet. 

To contribute, join our Discord and talk to us or reply on the thread on our forum.

Contribution Rewards — Points and Rewards distribution

Gitopia is a developer-centric ecosystem where developers will be rewarded to contribute to Open source and Web3. Everyone participating in the pool will get DEV points for their contributions which would later be converted to LORE token at genesis based on the formula:

Total Number of LORE token rewards at Genesis =  

( DEV Points accumulated by individual / Total number of DEV points earned by all the participants ) * Tokens pool reserved for this activity; [Max. 10,000 LORE token]

With the launch of Janus Testnet, developers will start getting rewarded for their contributions to Gitopia. The current distribution of rewards is planned in 2 major pools:

Total pool available: 1,250,000 LORE tokens

Reward Pool 1: Contribution rewards for developers, projects, Orgs and DAO on Janus Testnet— 750,000 LORE tokens 

Reward Pool 2: Reserved for additional rewards, programs and tasks during Janus Testnet - 500,000 LORE tokens 

Reward pool 1: — Contribution rewards for developers, projects, Orgs and DAO on Janus Testnet — 750,000

To win this reward pool, the participants would need to contribute to Gitopia and verified projects/DAO on Gitopia.

The reward pool is divided into three major categories of participation

- Developer 

- Verified Open source Projects and DAO

- Security, Testing and Bug reporting

Developers

Developers are at the heart of the entire ecosystem and one of the significant drivers in bootstrapping the Gitopia ecosystem. More tasks and points would be introduced for the developers during the Janus Testnet to make the contribution experience rewarding.

Eligibility: 

- Participation for developers is open. You need to create a Gitopia wallet and get started by following the steps in the docs

Pre-requisite

- Prior knowledge of programming in any language is recommended for getting started.

Tasks for the developers:

Terms and conditions: 

1. There is a whale cap of 10,000 LORE tokens per account to be won from this activity. 

2. Points for developers and validators are different, and their calculations will be based on the pool value and number of participants. 

3. Any user found spamming the repositories for reward points would be banned from the competition, and no rewards will be given to that account. 

4. To build on Gitopia, Talk to the team about how you can contribute. Just say Hi on Discord(#development) to get started. 

5. An individual can contribute to verified repositories and Gitopia any number of times. Still, only valid contribution approved by Gitopia Team and/or verified projects would only be eligible for the rewards. 

6. Any amount remaining from the above pool will be added to the community pool for future reward distribution. 

7. The projects starting from scratch on Gitopia and reaching 100+ contributions from the users can apply for verified projects by filling out the form. Contributors of these projects would then be eligible for the rewards stated for verified project contributors, as mentioned in the table above.

8. Gitopia reserves the right to revoke rewards and points to any participant, both individual and organization, in case of suspicion of spam for rewards.

9. The rewards will be based on the points. Points don't represent an equal number of LORE tokens(1:1) at Genesis.

10. For verified projects contribution on the repositories/projects listed on the forum is only valid. List of repositories https://forum.gitopia.com/t/list-of-verified-repositories-on-gitopia-to-contribute-and-earn-points/39/2

Verified Open source Orgs, DAO, and Web3 repositories

If you already have an open-source project available publicly to the contributors on any code collaboration platform, you can participate as a verified repository/DAO/Project at Gitopia by filling the form https://airtable.com/shrpHNwb1XiMf0s9b

There are currently two ways for Orgs, DAO, Team and Projects to earn rewards for migrating and building on Gitopia: 

- Migrate your repository to Gitopia and enable contribution rewards for the collaborators

- Participate in Airdrop and reward the contributors

Note: Migration to Gitopia does not mean leaving any existing code collaboration platforms. You can continue to co-exist on both while taking advantage of the Collaboration, Web3 specific workflows and incentives available on Gitopia.

Eligibility: 

* Should be an Open source, Web3 or community-driven project under development/live for at least three months or should be a project started on Gitopia getting significant traction from the community members other than the owner. 

* Migrate their workflows to Gitopia for contributors. 

* Fill out the form for verified repository/DAO/Project

* The rewards will be based on the points. Points don't represent an equal number of LORE tokens(1:1) at Genesis.

Terms and Conditions: 

1. Projects should not accept fake/ PR to win and reward their contributors. Any project found doing so would be banned from the competition. 

2. There is an Max whale cap of 10,000 LORE tokens for the addresses participating

3. The rewards will be based on the point mechanism, and actual points don't represent an equal number of LORE tokens at Genesis. 

4.There would be more points unlocked with new functionalities and actions, on-demand for the community.

Security, Testing and Bug reporting

Gitopia aims to build a robust platform for the communities to collaborate. For ensuring security and thoroughly testing the entire infrastructure, we have announced additional points for reporting and fixing security issues on Gitopia Janus Testnet.

Points for security, testing and Bug reporting

Terms and Conditions:

1. The bug reported should not be part of list of known bugs and must have not been reported earlier. 

2. There is an upper whale cap of 10,000 LORE tokens for the address participation.

3. The rewards will be based on the point mechanism and actual points don't represent equal number of LORE tokens at Genesis.

4. The actual point for the fix will be rewarded by the core team. 

Reward Pool 2: Reserved for additional rewards, programs and tasks during Janus Testnet — 500,000 LORE

We will be bringing in programs for the developers during the course of Janus Testnet to make it more exciting. The ‘Reward Pool 2’ is reserved for fuelling these activities during the Janus Testnet.

Airdrops to the community — 1,000,000 LORE

One of the primary goals of The Game of LORE is to reward as many past contributors of open source and Web3 community, exact details on the airdrop will be announced at the time of it going live.

Initial Ideas around the airdrop :

Must have conditions: 

- Should be a Fair drop and should include more number of contributors. 

- Should be given against contribution(work) and not against their stake. 

Ideas on communities to include for the airdrop

- Past contributors of any open source project used by the developers and highly driven by the community. 

- Blockchain developers who have contributed to building Opensource web3 projects. 

- Upstream contributors of Cosmos ecosystem. 

- Developer communities in other ecosystem. 

We would want to take an opinion from the community before locking the airdrop details. Participate in the discussion on the forum to let us know your opinion on the airdrop.

The Game of LORE has been designed to bootstrap the Gitopia Ecosystem and onboard early stakeholders such as validators, developers, and ecosystem partners to the platform. Gitopia is determined to create a decentralized code hosting and collaboration platform that empowers developers to create, manage and share their open-source projects without concerns and create a self-sustaining ecosystem around the Gitopia Platform. We believe this incentivization mechanism serves that end purpose while successfully fostering the initial incubation of the ecosystem.

Note:

1. There are possibilities for additional points and rewards other than the ones mentioned above for the community. These points(or rewards) will be announced during the course of the Janus Testnet. 

2. The settlement and calculation of rewards will be done close to the Gitopia Mainnet launch based on the blockchain transactions done by each account. Tokens will be distributed to contributors only after the Gitopia mainnet launch.

3. We will work closely with Opensource and Web3 communities regarding our Airdrop plan and distributions. The eligibility criteria and more details regarding airdrops will be announced later.

4. If you have any queries regarding The Game of LORE, feel free to reach out to us on our Discord channel. We’re grateful for the support we’ve received from the community and look forward to even bigger things to come. If you are excited and looking to participate, tweet and let us know about it.

About Gitopia

Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralised Code Collaboration Platform fuelled by a decentralised network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimise the software development process through collaboration, transparency, and open source incentivisation.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

The Game of LORE was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Gitopia is a decentralized code hosting and collaboration platform that stores git repositories on a decentralized network that is highly accessible, censorship-resistant, and empowers communities to create, own, and contribute to their open-source projects.

Gitopia is developed using the Cosmos SDK framework. The Cosmos SDK is a modular framework that simplifies the process of building custom, secure, scalable, and interoperable blockchain applications quickly.

Why Cosmos SDK?

Gitopia is a source code collaboration platform and there will be a lot of user interactions/transactions as we scale. We don’t want our users to wait for confirmations every time they perform an action or deal with pending transactions. This requirement alone meant that we couldn’t use many of the available blockchains to build Gitopia.

With Cosmos SDK, blockchains can maintain sovereignty, process transactions quickly, and communicate with other blockchains in the ecosystem, making it optimal for a variety of Gitopia’s main use cases. The other reasons for using the Cosmos SDK are as follows –

• Tendermint Consensus: The default consensus engine available within the SDK is Tendermint Core. Tendermint is the most (and only) mature BFT consensus engine in existence. It is widely used across the industry and is considered the gold standard consensus engine for building Proof-of-Stake systems.
• Open-source and Modular: The SDK is open source and designed to make it easy to build blockchains out of composable modules. As the ecosystem of open-source SDK modules grows, it will become increasingly easier to build complex decentralized platforms with it.
• Security: The SDK is inspired by capabilities-based security and informed by years of wrestling with blockchain state machines. This makes the Cosmos SDK a very secure environment to build blockchains. Access control firewalls your blockchain application against malicious modules.
• Interoperability: Blockchains built with Cosmos SDK can communicate tokens & value with other blockchains in Cosmos with the IBC module.

Tendermint BFT Consensus

The Gitopia main chain uses Tendermint as its consensus algorithm. Tendermint is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm developed by Jae Kwon in 2014 to address Proof of Work’s speed, scalability, and environmental concerns.

Baked into Tendermint’s consensus algorithm is the fundamental concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). In order to understand BFT, it’s necessary to have an overview of what it’s solving: the Byzantine Generals Problem.

A long time ago, a handful of generals and their armies were trying to attack a city. To defeat the city, all the generals needed to attack simultaneously — any less than full participation would mean the generals would lose. The issue is that none of the generals could reliably know when to attack the city. They were all secluded to each side of the city, and communications between them were impossible to synchronize. Messages could be lost, corrupted, or forged.

The challenge that faced the generals is compounded exponentially when more people or messages are factored in. Tendermint’s BFT Proof-of-Stake allows one hundred validators to quickly and securely confirm their ledgers against each other. In other words, all validators know when to attack the city.

A BFT Proof-of-Stake algorithm overcomes the Byzantine Generals Problem by using a partially synchronous network model. Basically, this means that the generals surrounding the city — or the validators voting on a block — don’t need to act at a preset time. Blocks are not voted on a schedule or predetermined size.

Tendermint achieves this by first randomly assigning validators the right to propose a block. Then, after blocks are proposed, validators vote in a multi-round deterministic process. Meaning, the first step is fairly indiscriminate, and the second follows a prescribed order.

With Tendermint, validators are rotated on a deterministic weighted round-robin format. Thus, the more stake a validator has, the more times they may be elected as a leader.

The Gitopia main chain uses Tendermint in its public Proof of Stake context. This works in the following method as described by the original Tendermint whitepaper:

“Validators are users with accounts that have coins locked in a bond deposit by posting a bond transaction. We say that a validator has voting power equal to the amount of the bonded coins.”

In such a system, the validator set is open and permissionless, which means that anyone who owns some of the staking tokens in the system can bond their coins and become a validator. In the Gitopia ecosystem, this staking token is known as LORE. The limited resource of LORE tokens acts as a Sybil prevention mechanism. A single actor cannot create multiple validator nodes in order to increase their voting power, as their voting power is determined by the total number of LORE tokens owned, not the number of validator nodes they control. Because all that determines a validator’s voting power is their bonded stake and not reputation or real-world identity, validators can choose to be anonymous or public.

Open source and Modular

The Cosmos SDK can be thought of as the Ruby-on-Rails of blockchain development. It comes with a core that provides the basic functionalities every blockchain application needs, like a boilerplate implementation of the Application Blockchain Interface (ABCI) to communicate with the underlying consensus engine, a multistore to persist state, a server to form a full-node and interfaces to handle queries.

On top of this core, the Cosmos SDK enables developers to build modules that implement the business logic of their applications. In other words, SDK modules implement the bulk of the logic of applications, while the core does the wiring and enables modules to be composed together.

This means that the Cosmos-SDK is packaged with batteries included, offering you a set of universal modules that you can simply plug into your application-specific blockchain. In addition, you get features like tokens, governance, interoperability, and staking pre-built. As the Cosmos network develops, the ecosystem of SDK modules will expand, making it increasingly easier to develop complex blockchain applications.

Security

Building a blockchain from scratch is not recommended since it is difficult to make sure that no potential bugs or vulnerabilities exist in the blockchain that you have developed. Cosmos SDK has a large community of open source developers that continuously modifies and improves the source code and ensures that vulnerabilities are found quickly and fixed. This makes blockchains built on Cosmos SDK more secure and stable.

Cosmos SDK is inspired by capabilities-based security. Capabilities constrain the security boundaries between modules, enabling developers to better reason about the composability of modules and limit the scope of malicious or unexpected interactions.

Some other important benefits an application-specific blockchain built using Cosmos SDK can bring in terms of security are:

• Developers can choose proven programming languages like Golang when building their application-specific blockchains instead of smart contract programming languages that are often more immature.
• Developers are not constrained by the cryptographic functions made available by the underlying virtual machines. Instead, they can use their own custom cryptography and rely on well-audited crypto libraries.
• Developers do not have to worry about potential bugs or exploitable mechanisms in the underlying virtual machine, making it easier to reason about the security of the application.

Inter Blockchain Communication(IBC) Bridge

The blockchain ecosystem is generally seen as a divided ecosystem of siloed decentralized networks that are unable to communicate or exchange data with each other, resorting to tribalism and competition instead of cooperation.

Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) allows heterogeneous blockchains to transfer tokens and data to each other, meaning that blockchains with different applications and validator sets are interoperable. For example, it allows public and private blockchains to transfer tokens to each other. Currently, no other blockchain framework enables this level of interoperability.

Gitopia will be integrated with the Cosmos IBC layer (Inter-Blockchain Communication) in order to establish interoperability between Gitopia’s application layer and various other blockchains that are interoperable with the Cosmos IBC.

Gitopia has a tremendous amount of utility in the open decentralized cryptocurrency ecosystem, as nearly all networks in the ecosystem reserve a certain portion of tokens to incentivize community-based development. Gitopia offers these decentralized networks the ability to use Gitopia’s decentralized repository management to establish transparency and provability of code contributions from community-based developers who are incentivized with network reserves. In addition, the IBC also offers a cross-chain payment channel (which is secured by the Cosmos Hub) that these networks can utilize to fund bounties/issues/proposals on Gitopia.

Conclusion

The Cosmos SDK is a popular framework to build decentralized applications for various industries and purposes. Thanks to the separation of the consensus and application-layer logic as well as the modularity of the Cosmos SDK, programmers can develop applications with modules that fit their use cases.

The use of the Cosmos SDK framework to build the Gitopia main chain has enabled us to leverage the Tendermint BFT consensus engine and build the blockchain optimized for Gitopia's use case. Also, IBC enables other IBC compatible chains to integrate directly with Gitopia.

Having said that, building on Cosmos SDK is not for everyone. The choice of which platform to build your decentralized applications on mainly depends on the needs of your project. Every platform has its unique set of advantages, tradeoffs, and governance options. Decentralized applications will need to evaluate and find the solution that fits them best.

Follow us

Website : https://gitopia.com/

Whitepaper: https://gitopia.com/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Gitopia

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/mVpQVW3vKE

Twitter : https://twitter.com/gitopiaDAO

Why Gitopia is Building with Cosmos SDK? was originally published in Gitopia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.