How can blockchain projects be sustainable? Unscrambling the incentive mechanism of BitCherry

Since the development of the Internet, the ownership of the code has always been monopolized by the centralized institutions using patent barriers. Unilateral network protocols inevitably have some security risks. With the rise of the concept of blockchain, open-source code is expected to replace traditional network protocols and become the core infrastructure of the Internet. In recent years, many decentralized solutions have been proposed for various blockchain projects, and the network decentralization and security have been significantly improved. However, the incentive mechanism for developers of many projects is still in the early stage of development. Developers cannot obtain continuous incentive in open-source projects, which means that the project will face the problems that the developer community cannot be expanded, the number of core developers will stagnate, and the project will not be able to repair loopholes and upgrade iteratively. Therefore, how to encourage developers to make long-term contributions to open-source projects is the key to the iterative development of projects.

Recently, the v1.0.1 version of the testnet of BitCherry, a distributed commercial public chain, officially started testing. BitCherry also used a 10 million reward to recruit developers for the test network. The advantage of reward incentive is that developers get corresponding rewards according to their contributions, which is fairer than other ways, and can encourage competent developers to join the community. It is also helpful for project expansion and suitable for solving the security related problems of the project. But on the other side, the bounty model also has some disadvantages. First of all, it will produce reverse incentive to the project. Simple tasks are popular, and difficult tasks are easy to be ignored, which is not conducive to the long-term development of the project. Moreover, the release of reward tasks is usually unsustainable, and developers passively accept tasks to get paid, which cannot motivate developers to actively contribute.

BitCherry, as a distributed commercial public chain, pays more attention to commercial ease of use and security, and relies more on the contribution of developers to the project. Both core developers and application layer DAPP need to have a reasonable incentive mechanism for funding, so the traditional way of motivating developers cannot be the main incentive mode of BitCherry. As the world's first scalable blockchain infrastructure based on IPv8 technology to serve distributed commerce, BitCherry designed the aBFT+PoUc consensus mechanism. Based on the asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm (aBFT), any node that meets the conditions (selects the neighbor node according to the unique bit-u value first) can participate in the whole network PoUc consensus process, while almost all the important nodes in the circle of friends can participate in the process. Important nodes will also participate in a friend's PoUc consensus process to maximize decentralization. Mainly uses the unique Bit-U incentive mechanism, which is composed of four dimensions, including time activity, user relevance, user activity, user contribution, etc. Developers with any dimension will be motivated, and the more dimensions, the greater the incentive.

The development of a project is inseparable from the developers and is closely related to the incentive mode of the project. Therefore, the combination of governance mechanism and incentive mode will become the key to the development of BitCherry developer community. It can be predicted that in the future ecological development of BitCherry, BitCherry will set up a special incubation fund for developers to cooperate with the incentive mechanism to further improve the sustainability of the project.