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Open Collective
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Transitioning from traditional LLCs or corporations, we support DAOs for collaborative internet projects. Our platform helps manage and fund these digital cooperatives, with transparency in spending and a user-friendly interface.

We are co-creating a new version of Open Collective to help collectives manage their resources in a transparent way on-chain with a user-friendly interface.

This is especially valuable for the Gitcoin community, allowing all of us to better track how public goods funding is used (raw blockchain transactions don’t tell the full story).

Beyond transparency, our goal is to enable communities to operate on-chain with multiple currencies, making it easy to reward all types of contributions—not just financial ones.

Intro

“Open Collective was the OG Open Source Software crowdfunding platform” - Kevin Owocki.

For the past decade, Open Collective has enabled 5,000+ collectives to raise over $130M (https://discover.opencollective.com).

By integrating multi-currency, transparent, and decentralized tools, we are building a co-operating system where collectives and organizations can:

  • Track and reward contributions beyond money (time, care, knowledge, environmental impact, …).
  • Share the responsibility of sustaining their project with the community (by being transparent on the resources necessary to run the project)

Background

To make space for a new web3 branch, we have recently decided to “exit to community” the existing web2 version. This new branch is focusing on building a web3 co-operating system to help local communities develop their own local economy, starting with the Commons Hub Brussels as a real-world model.

Communities need more than just funding—they need multi-currency systems to recognize non-financial contributions like time, labor, and care work. By issuing community tokens, projects can facilitate exchanges, boost collaboration, and create an on-chain record of community health.

With Regens Unite, we experienced the need for permanent spaces to rebuild local communities—rooted locally, globally connected. That’s why we created the Commons Hub Brussels. But managing a space like this requires more than just euros. We need:

  • A Yang currency (euros) to pay rent.
  • A Yin currency (care, time, contributions) to sustain the space and community.

Today’s tools don’t support this balance:

  • Open Collective offers transparent financial management but lacks web3 integration.
  • Citizen Wallet makes it easy to transfer community tokens but lacks tools to manage them.

Communities need a new way to organize beyond single-currency closed source bookkeeping systems. They need a transparent, open-source, multi-currency admin interface.

Philosophy

We believe communities, not individuals, must become the new base economic unit. This means shifting from competition to cooperation, from scarcity to abundance. From a single currency, a single way to contribute, to multiple currencies, multiple ways to contribute. This creates more opportunities for people within any given community to exchange and create relationships, making the whole community more resilient in the process.

The transparency also enables more collaboration and learnings. Right now, public good funding on Octant, Gitcoin and Giveth don't provide much transparency on how the funds are actually used by those projects. Which is quite ironic since everything is happening on-chain.

To move from individualism to collective resilience, we need tools that strengthen cooperation. By integrating web3, community currencies, and transparent financial management, we provide the infrastructure for regenerative, decentralized economies.

V3 of Open Collective

We have been running different experiments and we are now ready, with your funding, to consolidate everything to build a proper co-operating system, the new version of Open Collective.

While the project for Open Collective Web3 is less than one year old, it is rooted in a long history and is building up on a lot of lived experiences and existing social capital.

The experiments we ran included:

The current MVP we have is a combination of different tools that we have patched together to manage the Commons Hub Brussels as a community.

  • Open Collective to manage the ‘yang’ currency of the euro
  • Custom code to take into account crypto donations from Giveth and Gitcoin (preview)
  • Citizen Wallet to manage the ‘yin’ currency of the Commons Hub Token to reward people contributing to the community in non-financial ways (typically, cleaning / maintaining the space, organizing community events, …)
  • Monerium to bring all financial transaction on-chain
  • Custom code to annotate on-chain transactions (txinfo.xyz)
  • Custom code to bring everything together

Our commitment

  • Everything we do will be open source (always has been)
  • We will do as much on-chain as possible to ensure great compatibility with any other dapp.
  • We will eventually exit the company to the community (like we did with the current branch) through a DAO (with progressive decentralization)

Roadmap

  • 2025 Q2: Public beta of a first online platform where any project can sign up and start annotating their on-chain transactions, with a first focus on Gitcoin, Octant and Giveth projects (projects that are using community money and that owe to the community a much higher level of transparency than raw transactions on the blockchain)
  • 2025 Q3: Issue your own token(s) to start rewarding non-financial contributions
  • 2025 Q4: Dashboard to give a proper snapshot of the health of your community.

Tracking impact

  • Number of exchanges within communities on the platform, i.e. number of on-chain transactions with any token related to the community (between real people).

Get involved

Team

Previous Funding

  • We have received about $5k with our first Gitcoin participation (tweet)
  • We have received 25 ETH from Open Collective Inc to bootstrap (tx)

Open Collective History

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