Messari just released their annual Crypto Theses for 2024. This year’s report included a chart from a16z’s State of Crypto 2023 showing npm downloads for three of the leading packages used by decentralized apps going up and to the right, reaching all time highs in late 2023. The report includes the following quote: “If I could invest blindly into crypto based on a single chart, it’s this one.”

There’s a lot to love about this take, but one big problem: downloads are a terrible metric for monitoring ecosystem growth.

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We launched a few months ago with a commitment to open source everything. We attended the PL Summit in Istanbul last month and had a chance to present our work to the community.

We are excited to announce that we are now initiating coverage of the PLN open source economy!

Heatmap of all GitHub contributions to PLN open source projects since 2017.

This report is a shallow dive on 188 open source software projects that we are currently tracking within the PLN ecosystem. We are also tracking 1,000+ projects in the broader crypto economy, which we will cover in seperate reports.

RetroPGF is a unique kind of repeated game. With each round, we are iterating on both the rules and the composition of players. These things matter a lot. To get better, we need to study whether the rules and player dynamics are having the intended effect.

This post looks at the psychology of the game during Round 3, identifies mechanics that might have caused us to deviate from our intended strategy, and suggests ways of mitigating such issues in the future.

Disclaimer: I was a voter and had a project in Round 3. I also made a lot of Lists.

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We launched a few months ago with a commitment to open source everything. Here is our hello world post on the forum ICYMI.

This report is a shallow dive on the 300+ open source software projects participating in the latest round of retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF 3). It combines both off- and onchain data about projects.

The report itself has two objectives:

• Kickstart more rigorous analysis on the effectiveness of RetroPGF as a mechanism
• Snipe some data nerds to join our data collective

Let’s jump in.

How Open Source Observer commit to being the most open and reliable source of impact metrics out there.

At Kariba Labs, we believe deeply in the power of open source software. That is why we are building Open Source Observer (aka OSO), an open source tool for measuring the impact of open source projects. In order to achieve our goal of making open source better for everyone, we believe that OSO needs more than just open source code. We are committed to being the most open and reliable source of impact metrics out there. We will achieve this by committing the OSO project to the following practices:

• Open source software: All code is developed using permissive licenses (e.g. MIT/Apache 2.0)

• Open data: All collected and processed data will be openly shared with the community (to the extent allowed by terms of service)

• Open infrastructure: We will open up our infrastructure for anyone to contribute or build upon our existing infrastructure at-cost.