Open source hosting platforms like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket and SourceForge are becoming ever more popular for developers to host and review code, to manage projects and build software. With a user base of over 28 million developers and more than 1.8 million businesses and organizations using its platform, GitHub is considered the most popular project in its category. Just recently Microsoft has announced it acquired GitHub. Some say the takeover is a good thing, because now GitHub can now grow into an even bigger project and connect or collaborate with other existing Microsoft brands, while others, especially GitHub developers have trust issues with Microsoft for being a long-term opponent to open source software. Added to the fact that these kind of takeovers enable tech-giants to generate even more power to control the industry, this doesn’t sit well with a lot of GitHub users.
Benefits for developers using open source hosting platforms are the ability to showcase their work, documentation, ability to contribute to other (open source) projects, managing options and integration options.
On the downside these open source platforms are all centralized businesses and they do not always seem to have their customers best interest at heart. They are after all intended to make money on their business model. Developers can use the platform but their intellectual property rights as well as the lack of being rewarded for their input are downsides to looking out for the users that build the platform. HitChain aims to change that, by developing and launching a decentralized, autonomous community powered by Blockchain.
☑️ HitChain proposes to build a decentralized autonomous organization of blockchain community developers and improve upon the existing open source ecosystem that is, in their view, ineffective, unfair and centralized. HitChain intends to create the worlds largest software development and self-regulated, collaboration program through the blockchain.
Features that HitChain wants to implement into their ecosystem to improve on existing open source hosting projects like GitHub, GitKraken and GitLab are:
➡️ HitChain’s main goal is to accept all developers wanting to interact in a decentralized infrastructure project, while formalizing fair profit distribution to realize investor’s intrinsic value.
➡️ Centralized projects are vulnerable to security breaches, technical failures and they can have scalability issues. HitChain can solve these issues with their decentralized autonomous organization.
➡️ By the decentralized nature of the HitChain project, developers work can be safely stored through the implementation of smart contracts. This way the developers intellectual property rights are verified and safeguarded through the blockchain.
➡️ In the centralized open source hosting ecosystems, developers aren’t rewarded for their work they contribute to the platform. HitChain will change this by installing the digital currency protocol. This protocol will incentivize developers based on the designated algorithm. By implementing this feature, HitChain ensures fairness, accountability, autonomy and justice by enabling developers to transact and earn in an algorithmic market freely.
➡️ A trustworthy, transparent competency, appraisal and credit system will be established to collect and manage developer’s data. This appraisal system will be cost-efficient.
➡️ Because of the implementation of blockchain technology, transactions executed on the HitChain network are transparent and publicly traceable.
➡️ The open source platform will be maintained and updated by the developers in the HitChain community, and all major decisions will be based on the community voting system that is supervised by an independent committee.
Ever since its source code went public on GitHub, the HitChain project has already had 15 different contributors upload 718 commits over the course of a few weeks. Until now 349 developer stars has been given. Stars are a way for GitHub users to bookmark a repository for future reference.
☑️ According to ICO review website ICOdrops, HitChain raised a total amount of 2,300,000 USD in their token sale that launched or ended at the 24th of July. A total token supply of 102,400,000,000 HIT tokens have been minted of which 30% were sold in the private and public tokensale, 40% will go to future mining rewards, 5% will go towards their marketing budget, while the other 25% is divided between the team and the foundation (15% vs. 10%). HIT tokens are initially launched as ERC-20 tokens, using the Ethereum blockchain. After HitChains main net launch ERC-20 HIT tokens can be exchanged for native HIT tokens.
HitChain has had its global exchange listing debut on digital asset exchange Huobi Global, where you can now trade HitChain against the following trading pairs HIT/ BTC and HIT/ ETH.
☑️ Team, advisers and investors
The HitChain team is comprised of industry professionals, mainly from the Asian region, that have extensive experience in the field of open source products, and have worked at some of the worlds’ well-known companies, like Microsoft, RedHat, Openstack and OSChina.
Two of China’s top blockchain experts, Jia Tian, Chief Scientist at Cortex and Haobo Ma, fouder of AELF Blockchain, are HitChain project advisers.
The list of institutional investors on this project is pretty impressive. I will highlight three of them:
➡️ ASIC-miner manufacturer and supplier BitMain has become an established business in the cryptocurrency industry.
➡️ Huobi Capital is the investment arm of one of the worlds’ leading global digital asset financial service providers, Huobi Group.
➡️ Venture Capital firm Draper Dragon invests in companies based on their innovative technologies and business models with market appeal.
☑️ As I see it, HitChain, which is still in its early stage of development, has a lot of upside potential, especially when they focus more on getting recognition from the western markets. Some points of improvements are the bilingual Telegram channel. A Chinese/ English chat is confusing, I would suggest splitting it into two separate channels. I would have liked to see the HitChain team members profiles on LinkedIn, but unfortunately they were not available.
HitChain seems to have focused primarily on gaining a market share in the Asian market as there is not a lot of public information available in English. I would like to see some more project information in the form of press releases, Twitter posts and Medium articles. The recent takeover of GitHub by Microsoft has some developers looking for another go-to open source platform and being the new kid on the block with the added benefits like a reward system and intellectual property registration through the blockchain, HitChain can profit from that. Only time will tell whether or not HitChain will succeed in surpassing GitHub as being the worlds’ largest open source hosting platform.
If you would like to know more about the project you can visit their website, read their whitepaper or join their twitter or Telegram channel to learn about the latest updates.
☑️ As of the 3rd of August, HitChain is trading at Huobi Global, with the trading pairs HIT/BTC and HIT/ETH being available. Huobi Global is one of the worlds’ leading digital asset exchanges. If you don’t have a trading account on Huobi Global yet, you can sign up, using this link. By signing up you will automatically get approved for trading on Huobi Autonomous Digital Asset Exchange (HADAX).
Full disclosure: I do not own any HitChain tokens. This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my personal opinion about the HitChain project. You should always do your own research. Huobi Pro rewards me for writing this article and supports me for ventilating my own personal opinion.
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LindaCrypto