This week, we launched the beginning of what I hope to grow into a much bigger part of Dark: our open source effort. We took three important steps:
- We launched our first open source project, in partnership with Corbits: Mallory.
- We announced our first $10,000 in funding for open source contributions to Mallory, facilitated with Merit.
- Today: we're announcing another $10,000 in funding for the best product built on top of Mallory in Solana's x402 hackathon.
Project Open Source underpins both our current goals as an early stage company and our broader views on the current state of software and how we see the software industry evolving in the future.
Open source in an age where IP is worth $0
Open source software ecosystems have always moved faster than closed-source ones. There are multiple fundamental benefits to open source: more developers pushing PRs to solve problems, standardized solutions to software problems that don't benefit from different competing approaches in production nor yield competitive advantage to developers who keep their solutions closed-source, etc. Market dynamics have aligned with this: empirically, open source software has seen great success finding enough funding to facilitate sufficient development velocity. There have also been brand upsides to contributing open source — companies that hire or sponsor talent that contributes significantly to notable open source projects gain brand reputation amongst industry insiders, helping with hiring talent, building partnerships, and even selling to customers (typically in B2B scopes).
All of these "traditional" upsides still exist, and part of our motivation at Dark to contribute to open source software certainly lies in them. But in 2025, I think there's an important additional evolution:
Increasingly sophisticated AI-powered coding is trending the value of code as IP to $0.
You can argue the value of code has long been questionable. Most technology startups don't grow in value from their code, but in something their code plays a part in facilitating — Uber, for example, holds its value (mostly) from its network effects, not from the actual lines of code at the company. This will always be nuanced and dependent on industry, of course — an AI company pre-training foundational models may find IP value in their model weights and choose not to open source them, and a trading firm may similarly find IP value in its trading algorithms (although these types of IP evaluations bring up even more questions which have been encouraging open source: AI companies, for example, often open source their pre-training weights because being known as the creators of next-generation technology is enough to move their growth, expansion, and ultimately revenue forward. Trading firms are a lot more careful in open sourcing technologies because their business models rely on having a continuous technological edge in markets that don't care much for human values like trust, comfort, or reputation — and that kind of moat is usually pretty flimsy, so it must be guarded carefully). Naturally, as software becomes easier to learn and write, and especially as intelligent tools to write software become more ubiquitous, more people are capable of producing the same software syntax and patterns. This points to a commoditization of software, at which point intellectual property trends to $0.
A final important caveat: while software syntax and patterns become easier to write, product taste continues to be very difficult for AI to replicate (and will likely continue to be so for a very long time). This also changes the math on open source for a company — the more multidimensional their work, the more their organizational taste is a moat (trading firms, again, are a good example here: trading markets tends to be lower-dimensionality work than building for users, so taste is less relevant for a trading algorithm than a consumer product — meaning the trading algorithm needs to be protected more in order for it to work).
I think software IP trending to $0 is bad if you rely on software IP being valuable, but if you're a creator whose ultimate goal is to use software as a means to an end of creating something valuable, I think it's a great evolution (If you've read Dark's article about Why you'll know I've been in love with code since I was a child, but for its ability to create things and not for the act of writing it in itself). In the open source context, I think this IP trend amplifies the value of open sourcing your code: you can now gain more in visibility across brand, talent, and user fronts while trading off less downside to giving away your source code. And further, if you know how to leverage open code and open coding developer communities, you can find a way to facilitate greater velocity for the development of projects you care about.
OSS: A language to communicate ideas through code
For a new company like Dark, open source serves an additional strategic function: showing our thinking and our work through code. Companies are like people: if you want your company to develop a healthy reputation within an ecosystem, give people ways to get to know you. Open source becomes a way to showcase your ideas, your view of the world, and your principles on how you go about creating valuable things. It attracts similarly-minded developers and helps you grow your talent pool. It gives investors and customers proof of work they can audit. As you start to integrate third-party code from within the industry, it can even inspire software partners to evolve their products (we've already seen this with Mallory) and provides a tangible, transparent foundation for these types of industry-level conversations to take place.
We want to be an active industry participant at Dark — we want to inspire ecosystem conversation, and we want to be inspired by it.
Putting our money where our mouth is
We're bootstrapping our open source effort with $20,000 of our own capital because new ecosystems need someone to kickstart momentum. This $20,000 is intended as a first test towards building that momentum — we'll invest more if it goes well, and keep iterating on our approach (while probably still investing more) if it doesn't until we find an approach we like.
Our partnership approach is deliberate: we want to build deep relationships with partners and foster deep alignment. By finding intersection points between what we're interested in and what our partners are interested in, we think we'll compound the effort around our open source work as a whole — "rising tide lifts all ships". Tangibly, success here means that funding in the future will not come from us entirely; I'd love to see our partners find enough value in Dark's open source work to sponsor their own funding for it. $20,000 is a bigger start than I've seen from most startups (especially our age), but I'd like to see this number get much bigger: I'm looking forward to crossing our first $100,000 funded towards open source work and beyond.
It doesn't happen without you
We don't compound unless we grow a compounding community effort — it's as true as it may sound obvious. What I'm particularly excited about is finding exciting ways for different types of stakeholders to participate:
- If you're a developer, the opportunity is straightforward: contribute to projects that interest you and get paid for it. Review our code, submit improvements, build on top of what we've created. The Merit system ensures you'll be fairly compensated for quality contributions. If you're looking to grow your reputation as a new developer in the space: this is the perfect place to do it. Become a major contributor and get noticed by companies and investors alike — they're paying attention.
- If you're building a company or running an ecosystem team, consider how our open source work can accelerate your roadmap. We're working with teams on everything from building tools that solve gaps in their development effort to catalyzing their ability to grow visibility in the ecosystem or showcase their product capabilities. Partner with us — bring your requirements, your expertise, your own funding if it makes sense. Every new sponsor that joins the effort compounds results for everybody involved, including you.
- If you're an investor, turn our open source work into a platform to tangibly solve technological needs for your portfolio companies or hiring pipelines for those looking to grow.
How to contribute to Dark's OSS
If you're a developer interested in contributing to Dark's open source work, there's two ways to get started today:
- As part of $10,000 we've allocated to general open source contributions: Push a PR to one of Dark's open source repos and have it merged successfully. You can find our Github here.
- To win our $10,000 prize in Solana's x402 hackathon: Learn more about Solana's x402 hackathon guidelines and submit the best project built on top of our Mallory open source Github repo before the hackathon deadline.
I'm incredibly excited to see how our first $20,000 in funding goes for building on top of Dark's open source work, and I can't wait until this number is a small beginning that we look fondly back on to something grown magnitudes larger.
What will you build?