🧪 Mad Science Project Idea: Tokenized GitHub Repositories

[smartcontracts]

What is an Mad Science Project Idea?

A Mad Science Project Idea is an idea for a project within the Optimism ecosystem that may not have clear value but is generally cool as heck. Mad Science Project Ideas make great hackathon projects and tend to be a great way to explore Optimism, OP Mainnet, and the OP Stack.

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Summary

High level objective: Influence developers to reflect their work in tokens so we can fund them with RetroPGF. Rough idea: Make it easy to tokenize a GH repo. The owner can choose an initial allocation, automatic rewards for merged PRs, etc. They are then responsible for distributing the tokens to contributors, etc.

Possible Features

• Allow the repository owner to "tokenize" a repository by adding a GitHub app.
• Allow the owner to modify the mechanism to distribute tokens.

[carlbarrdahl]

Did some explorations in this a while back in two repos:
https://github.com/carlbarrdahl/git-dao
https://github.com/carlbarrdahl/gitwork

Gitwork allows you to add bounties to GitHub issues. It works by finding the person who made the commit in a PR that closed the issue and generating a signature for them to send to the smart contract. Here are the relevant pieces of code:

• https://github.com/carlbarrdahl/gitwork/blob/master/apps/web/pages/%5Bowner%5D/%5Brepo%5D/%5Bissue_number%5D/claim.tsx#L115-L149

• https://github.com/carlbarrdahl/gitwork/blob/master/hardhat/contracts/BountryRegistryV1.sol#L90-L106