As you might have noticed by now, there has been trouble brewing over the use of Slack as a communication platform for cryptocurrency projects. There is a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with the development of the platform, which increasingly makes it unfit to meet the growing needs of the crypto community. Stories about scams and phishing have been rife, and there seems to be no improvement in sight.

The joined ecosystem of crypto communities has come together to find an alternative, and it seems Rocket Chat could be The One. 10 projects have migrated to the platform, or are in the process of doing so. This move makes a lot of sense, since Rocket Chat is an open source initiative, with the community functioning as its maintainer.

We are glad to see the communities come together and take matters into their own hands to make a change happen, rather than wait passively and hope for the best.

We at FundRequest are moving as well: Join us at Rocket Chat!

Practical Limitations of Open Source

However, there are some practical limitations to the Rocket Chat platform that could still be improved upon, particularly with regard to specific requirements in functionality for the crypto communities. There has been a discussion on the Aragon forum regarding this topic, with even a suggestion to hire a dedicated developer for the implementation of new features. This developer would then be paid through a communal fund that all crypto communities can contribute to.

Hiring developers to pool funds is an interesting idea for sure, but immediately there are a number of practical problems that arise.

First of all, it will be a hard choice which issues and features have to be prioritized for the community as a whole. Second of all, the notion of a centralized fund seems to go against the principles of the crypto community, as does the hiring of one guy to oversee all development.

The Rocket Chat DAO

What if we work on DAO around Rocket Chat that has FundRequest as a driver? If you aren’t yet familiar with the way our platform works, please have a look at our website, or check our one-minute video on How It Works.

FundRequest introduces a crowdfunding system for developers. The community of users can fund bugs or new features and programmers can pick up and solve these requests. The simplicity of our platform allows users to issue bug fixes and feature suggestions without any coding knowledge. Developers can also find issues related to their skill set which provides an alternative source of income for them.

The mechanism behind our platform could be used to help develop this DAO, almost as an autonomous self-evolving organisation. This DAO could submit feature request bounties to FundRequest, and use this reward system to decide which features should be prioritized. A request with a higher bounty

would evidently show to have more value to the community, and soon a hierarchy of importance would emerge from the collected requests.

Any member of the crypto ecosystem could create an issue or feature suggestion in the Rocket Chat repository, and add crypto funds that are linked directly to this request. If your issue occurs across multiple projects, then funds can be pooled on the same issue to make the reward attractive.

This way, instead of having to rely on one developer, the resolving of issues is presented to the community that is already delivering you the software you love to use.