I think you can think of the Ethereum blockchain as a giant distributed database. What the blockchain does is it allows you to manage trust between parties across the internet. One of the reasons why that’s really powerful is we can store all the information about the bounty task on the blockchain, and that can be the source of truth for all parties about the state of the task.

So in contrast to a legacy financial system crowdsourcing platform like Upwork, for example, Gitcoin never actually is an intermediary that holds any of the funds between the bounty submitter and the bounty hunter. So when you post a bounty to Gitcoin, you’re actually submitting it to the Ethereum blockchain, and the funds that you’re associating with the issue live on the Ethereum blockchain, which is just a massive simplification over the credit card and legacy financial system where we would have to deal with translations between currencies, and having a legal structure associated with doing Escrow and stuff like that.

Basically, the task goes onto the Ethereum blockchain, and the way Metamask works is it’s just basically an Ethereum wallet that allows you to confirm that you meant to put that information on the blockchain, and the technology that powers Metamask is actually RSA public/private key encryption. So if you wanna do a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain, you’re signing it with your private key, and that’s how the rest of the computers on this giant distributed database know that the funds are authorized to come from you, and that the information actually came from you. So it all goes out there into the blockchain world, and then other people can pick up the funded work and turn it around by submitting their own transaction to the blockchain, which claims the funded work on the platform.

All this functionality lives on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and that’s a pretty powerful way of removing the need to have an intermediary, the need to do international translation of currency…

The other powerful use case that this enables is the ability to pay your bounty hunters with tokens. If you think about all these ICO’s who have raised 10-20 million dollars to fund their projects, they probably have some Ether on hand that they can use to incentivize actions of their community, but they also probably have a native Ethereum token that they can use to incentivize work on their repo.

[ ] That’s powerful, because it allows them to tie their incentives as repo maintainers with the incentives of the person who turned around the work, because they both hold the same token that rises and falls in value associated with the success or failure of their project. So I think that that’s an interesting use case that could never even exist in the legacy financial world.