TeamCoin

TEAM aims to build a universal “Contribution Graph”: a verified, distributed & immutable register of projects & who contributed to them. Such a system can answer the following question: Who contributed what, where? e.g. “Linus Torvalds created the Linux Kernel” or “Brian Chesky co-founded AirBnB in 2008”. Such a register can be of tremendous value to the creative professions in the Open Source and Startup communities.

Such a graph can be used to assess a project contributor’s reputation, assign a fair equity split in early projects or even automatically compensate team members for the work they have done. There are 3 main components required to build such a graph: People, Roles & Projects. Roles (e.g. “CTO”, “Designer”, “Developer”) form the edges linking together People & Project nodes in a graph. Project & Role descriptions are reached by voted consensus among the People participating in a project.

Blockchain technology offers a couple of interesting properties appropriate for a project like TEAM. The following are the core characteristics TEAM requires to work: IMMUTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY and DECENTRALISATION.

IMMUTABILITY is achieved by storing Roles as contracts or transactions in the blockchain. TRANSPARENCY is achieved through a voting process to define project descriptions and roles: all project members need to agree for changes to be made. The blockchain transaction history serves as a transparent representation of how a consensus was reached. DECENTRALISATION of identity verification is desirable long-term and can be achieved through collaboration with projects like Civic.