GitPOAP raises $4 million to bring Github contributions on-chain

GitPOAP, a protocol that allows users to record contributions to the software development platform GitHub on-chain, has raised a $4 million round led by Inflection.xyz and Libertus Capital, the company said on Thursday. The valuation was not disclosed. 

Avalanche VC, Protocol Labs and Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP) itself participated in the round, along with angel investors such as former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. 

Built on top of POAP – a piece of code which produces a specific type of NFT that shows you attended an event or experience – GitPOAP operates by issuing non-fungible token (NFT)-based POAP badges to indicate meaningful contributions to GitHub projects. Founder Colfax Selby says this has helped to incentivize work on projects that may have gone overlooked. 

A former Bloomberg engineering team leader, Selby founded the company with CTO Jay Puntham-Baker, an ex-Vimeo engineer in January 2022. 

«When I worked at Bloomberg, we had an internal accomplishment system but those sort of things stay with you internally in the company and nobody really understands them outside of them,» he explained in an interview with The Block. «There’s an opportunity to use NFTs like POAPs to recognize contributions and accomplishments in a self-sovereign way.»

Patricio Palladino of the Nomic Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to Ethereum’s development platform, said in the funding release that since issuing GitPOAPs, there have been «more meaningful contributions» to its developer tool Hardhat. 

Along with announcing the round, the startup is also opening up onboarding to any open source project from today. It previously launched in April of this year but was only available for certain projects. 

Source