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【Network Introduction】Gitopia

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Basic Information

Ownership Status: Privately Held (backing)

Financing Status: Venture Capital-Backed

Primary Industry: Business/Productivity Software

Network Detail

Brief Introduction

Developer of a decentralized code collaboration platform designed to create a new paradigm for open source software development, The company uses a built-in incentivization mechanism that provides permanent, censorship-proof, and decentralized storage of code repositories, enabling developers to collaborate, build, and get rewarded.

Social Media

WebsiteDocumentsTwitterMediumDiscordTelegramGithub

Missions

Gitopia solves the shortcomings of existing platforms mentioned below, by providing a decentralized and developer-centric code hosting and collaboration platform that the users themselves govern:

The monopoly of Centralized player; Censorshie; Lack of community involvement in platform policymaking; Lack of Transparency; No incentive for users in platform growt3; Single Point of Failure; No inherent open source incentivizationW; Not tailored for Decentralized Ecosystem; Lack of Collaboration Export.

Gitopia proposes a system that stores git repositories on a decentralized network, one that is highly accessible, censorship-resistant, and empowers communities to create, share ownership, contribute and govern their open source code.

Gitopia will reinvent open-source funding and make open-source software development sustainable. It will also incentivize open source contributors by creating a virtual and global economy around their work.

Products

Gitopia is a decentralized code hosting and collaboration platform, built using open-source blockchain protocols. Synthesizing best practices in modern software development, Gitopia offers robust collaboration features on top of a decentralized storage mechanism.

Features

Permanent storage: By leveraging blockchain technology, Gitopia provides its users with a permanent and easily retrievable home for their code.

Decentralized: Gitopia will have a decentralized network of validators and stakers to govern and secure the platform. There will be no central authority in Gitopiab.

Governance: In Gitopia, all the platform-related decisions will be taken with the community’s involvement transparently. They can vote on proposals and help shape the future of Gitopiab.

Censorship Resistant: There is no central authority that can take down any repository on Gitopia. Instead, the community decides the content policies and is responsible for platform moderationb.

No Single Point of Failure: There will be no disruption of service in Gitopia due to the usage of a decentralized network. The decentralized network of Gitopia will provide high availability and a stable network.

Secure: The repositories on Gitopia will be secured by public-key cryptography and thus resistant to unauthorized usage and hacking.

Transparent: The source code of Gitopia will be open source, and hence its workflows are out in the open for other developers to inspect.

Users will be stakeholders of Gitopia and will get incentivized when the Gitopia platform grows.

Open-source incentivization: Open-source incentivization will be integrated into the Gitopia workflow. It will be designed to motivate open-source developers to contribute to open-source projects actively.

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

Roadmap

Teams and Partners

Teams

Parth Oberoi-Founder

Parth is an entrepreneur, programmer, and open source contributor. He started his open source journey with Google Summer of Code, contributing to the syslog-ng project. And once he got exposed to the decentralized ecosystem, he saw the possibilities in this new space. He incorporated Tech Trap and began consulting for decentralized projects. It is during this time, the idea of a decentralized code collaboration platform evolved.

Faza Mahamood-Founder

Faza is a software developer interested in upcoming technologies like decentralized systems, machine learning, etc. He has also participated in Google Summer of Code, contributing to the GDAL project of OSGeo. He has experience working in the Data Analytics and Developer Assessment industry. He got convinced to work in the new-emerging decentralized ecosystem by Parth and has never looked back ever since.

Snehil Buxy-Head of Product Design

Snehil is highly experienced in developing products involving rich UI/UX experiences. Before joining Gitopia, Snehil was a Founder and Head of Design & Experience at Mudrex. Mudrex is a Y Combinator incubated crypto trading platform. Before that, he co-founded Housing.com and was the Head of Product. Housing.com is a popular Indian online real estate listing platform. He is also an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Kushagra Singh-Marketing

Kushagra is a software engineer turned marketer. He has worked for multiple Blockchain projects in the past under his own Blockchain growth consulting company Neptune Blockchain. Neptune blockchain helped protocols in adoption from writing whitepapers, token economics, community growth, mainnet launch and product adoption. Prior to Gitopia, Kushagra was working with CoinDCX as a Senior Growth Hacker. He played a crucial role in the company’s growth in the Indian and Global markets and gaining over a million users.

Stian Sandsgaard-Product Design

Stian is a product designer with 11 years of experience in the corporate and startup industry. He specializes in UX and UI design, as well as having experience in animation and VFX. In the past, Stian has worked with multiple brands across the globe including fortune 500 companies. The clients he has worked with include Samsung, Berkshire Hathaway, Blizzard, Adobe, and GoFundMe to name a few.

Partners

Some of the foundations and organizations offering grants for open source work are:

Funding

Gitopia Valuation & Funding

Investors

Technolgy

Tech Knowledge

MVP Implementation

The MVP implementation of Gitopia mainly consisted of a git based Code hosting platform built using Arweave. Arweave is a blockchain that enables permanent, low-cost storage of regular digital data. Arweave provides us with permanent storage, where we pay only once for storage, and retrieve it freely forever. Arweave protocol and its incentivization mechanisms ensure that all the data are accessible permanently and do not depend on a centralized service provider’s trust.

In the basic implementation of Gitopia, the objects were directly stored on Arweave even though processing the objects into packfiles and then storing them was more efficient. This was done due to the fact that processing packfile would have needed an intermediary server resulting in our application becoming more complex and heavy. Due to this, although the Gitopia platform worked well as a Code hosting platform, it had some shortcomings.

On Clone

The user would need to fetch all the packfiles (total number of git pushes) for that particular repository from Arweave, making this process time-consuming.

On Web

The lazy loading of git objects would not be possible. The process of waiting for the download of all the packfiles to render the repository view on the web browser would result in a bad user experience since the waiting time can take up to a few minutes in the case of big repositories.

Inference

Arweave provides us with permanent storage, which we need to use optimally for storing pakfiles Gitopia needs a fast contract layer for state management of various actions performed by the user. A compute layer optimized to perform git operations and other CI/CD actions would be needed.

Decentralized Compute Infrastructure

The compute layer will be responsible for the processing of the packfiles. The compute infrastructure will process these packfiles into:

  1. a single packfile available for users to clone
  2. destructured packfile (i.e. git objects of the above single pack file available as loose git objects, to serve the web app and lazy load the file browser view efficiently).

The decentralized compute infrastructure will also be responsible for:

  1. CI/CD workflows
  2. Code quality check
  3. Unpacking git loose objects for optimized rendering at the web app

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.

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. 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.

Technical Challenges

Making a truly decentralized variant of a complex application like GitHub has a few technical challenges, as described below:

Git Protocol

git uses a smart protocol when transferring objects between git client and the server. It figures out which git objects are needed and compresses them into an optimized Packfile format, in order to transfer git objects efficiently during fetch or push.A decentralized variant cannot feature this optimization directly at the data layer, as data can be appended to the blockchain but existing data cannot be optimized. The MVP implementation used git objects, but it is not efficient when dealing with large repositories.

Latency

The introduction of a decentralized system results in latency issues, due to the delays in transaction broadcast and nodes arriving at a consensus. This latency results in a poor user experience and must be addressed.

CrossChain Interaction

Blockchains are optimized for a specific task. In order to design a complex app like GitHub, integration of various solutions is required to achieve this goal.

Gitopia Platform Components

A decentralized computer infrastructure that will handle the processing of packfiles. This will make the platform more efficient while dealing with large repositories.

Gitopia chain will run on delegated-Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) based Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) Tendermint consensus engine. This will solve the latency issues.

To promote cross-chain interaction, Gitopia will be integrated with an Inter Blockchain Communication(IBC) layer.

Ecosystem

Governance Workflows

Existing solutions don’t involve users in their policy making, leaving users with no option but to comply with policies due to a lack of alternative solutions.

In Gitopia, all the platform-related decisions will be taken with the community’s involvement in a transparent manner. Tokens will be distributed to the community overtime to ensure the decentralization of voting power.

Some examples include: Setting platform fees and other incentivization mechanisms; and Platform moderation.

Governance in org/repo

Voting on proposals

Management of project treasure

Giving write access to a new user

Revoking existing access

Governance in Gitopia

Voting on Gitopia Improvement Proposal

Management of community fun­

Setting platform fees

DAO Model at Gitopia

The DAO model at Gitopia is focused on value chain creation. 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.

At Gitopia, Anybody can take the initiative and make proposals to create new working groups or change the way things are run. 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 opportunities to grow the ecosystem and develop meaningful relationships with the contributors in the early era.

Economic Model

LORE Token

Gitopia is a proof-of-stake chain built on Cosmos-SDK that leverages LORE Token(LORE), a native utility token, as the primary means to govern, secure the blockchain, and provide a default mechanism to store and exchange value.

Token Functions

LORE Token will act as the reserve currency in the Gitopia ecosystem while ensuring the platform’s public blockchain’s economic security through staking.

Token Utility

The token holders can use the LORE token for the following purposes

  1. To bootstrap engagement on Gitopia
  2. To create Validators and staking
  3. To participate in Gitopia’s governance
  4. As a mode of exchange for frictionless transactions to host code and collaborate (It should be very minimal and should not introduce friction; Is only introduced to prevent spamming)
  5. To sponsor/tip a user developing and contributing on Gitopia
  6. To fundraise for projects hosted on Gitopia
  7. Medium of payment and exchange for code collaboration on Gitopia

Token Economics

LORE Token is an Inflationary supply token with a genesis supply of 500,000,000 LORE and a maximum supply of 1,711,136,432 LORE. Inflation halving happens every two years and the maximum supply cap is expected to be reached by the year 2033. Stakers of LORE will be able to earn approximately 35% staking rewards for the first two years.

Token Release Schedule

Validators&Stakers

Introduction

Validators play a pivotal role in the network by provisioning new blocks and processing transactions. They earn LORE tokens for their service. Validators earn newly minted LORE tokens for provisioning new blocks, while they earn a transaction fee for processing transactions.

Token holders who don’t wish to be validators themselves 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. The validator also charges a commission on top of that.

Token holders also share the risk when delegating their tokens to validators. Therefore, it is advised for token holders to do their due diligence on the validators they choose before staking. In case of unsolicited behavior from a validator, a portion of their staking, including those of their delegators, is slashed.

Responsibilities

  1. Run a full node and participate in consensus by broadcasting votes which contain cryptographic signatures signed by their private key.
  2. 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.
  3. Actively participate in governance. Validators play a special role in the governance system. Being the pillars of the system, they are required to vote on every proposal. It is especially important since each time a validator does not vote on a proposal, it will get slashed by a minimal amount.
  4. Validators are expected to be active members of the community. They should always be up-to-date with the current state of the ecosystem so that they can easily adapt to any change.
  5. A validator has the option to exit the system at any time. This can be done by executing an unstake transaction on the contracts. Do note that a 21-day withdrawal period is in place to ensure sufficient time for any penalties/slashing to be levied within this duration if any fraudulent behavior was detected from the validator.

Run a Validator on the Gitopia Mainnet

Set-up Tutorial

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About BlockPower

Our Staking Services

Why Choose Us to Manage Your Assets

  1. We have started 7/24 staking services since 2018, and have managed over $100 million assets.
  2. We run highly available and redundant nodes in different data centers to achieve continuous operations.
  3. We are actively participating in community and governance, disclosing information frequently.

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