Motivation

Why are we building Overmind?

A platform that challenges, educates, and rewards developers, while providing the infrastructure and gold standard for building an on-chain reputation, is the first step towards bridging the web3 developer gap. This is Overmind.

Bridging the web3 developer gap

While there are over 30 million developers globally, by the end of 2022 there were less than 25K monthly active web3 developers contributing to open-source repositories. To put this into context: Amazon alone is estimated to employ over 35K developers. If the vision of web3 is to materialize, our industry needs to rapidly expand the pool of robust developer talent to build the applications that will finally cross the adoption chasm. We need to fill in web3's developer gap.

What accounts for this gap? Despite the significant capital accumulation in the space, the transition from web2 to web3 remains challenging and high risk for most web2 developers. The skills required to be a strong web3 developer are poorly understood, let alone documented. Jobs and income appear too volatile for most people to leave a stable web2 job. Overmind introduces the ability to systematically earn in web3 without leaving one’s web2 job, which we view as the core missing link between educational content and the web3 leap. The ability to earn de-risks the time investment required to learn and practice web3 development, and may thus offer a real opportunity to enter web3 to significantly more people.

Building on-chain reputation for developers

Not only are expert web3 developers an exceptionally rare breed; screening to identify them is highly challenging. Past experience tends to be limited. Work history and open-source contributions are unreliable outside of the top projects. Those challenges equally apply to developers who are growing their skills, most of whom lack the channels to reliably signal them.

We believe that on-chain reputation will be the foundational layer of web3 economies, whether towards facilitating employment, financial transactions, or social status. Far richer context than what is available today is required to enable most real-world economic transactions on-chain. For developers, on-chain data related to their skills and contributions remains sparse and low signal. Overmind creates a transparent, verifiable track record of their skills and creativity that anyone can refer to, forming the basis for their professional reputation on-chain. For instance Neurons, rewarded for solving certain Overmind quests, directly serve as an on-chain proof-of-skill.