Blockchain and other web3 initiatives are vying for developers’ attention by holding hackathons, doling out awards, and providing other incentives. However, they do not currently have the resources to assess the enormous volume of applications they get, which deters some of the same builders who could be of great assistance to those projects. QuestBook, a company working to address these issues and others, said today that it has secured $8.3 million in its Series an investment in order to grow its operations.
Numerous investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Dragonfly, Hashed, Polygon, Balaji Srinivasan, Raj Gokal of Solana, Arjun Sethi of Tribe Capital, and Maneesh Sharma of GitHub, participated in the fundraising round that was led by Lemniscap. QuestBook runs an eponymous platform that enables businesses to fund developers and make investments in them in a more effective and transparent manner. In order to take some of the load off of other blockchain and web3 companies, it also analyzes projects using a variety of criteria, such as a developer’s on-chain and GitHub history.
The firm, established in May 2021, initially aimed to assist builders in making cryptocurrency. But it quickly discovered, according to one of its co-founders Madhavan Malolan, that there weren’t many programmers proficient in Solidity and Rust, the coding languages supporting the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, respectively. The developer ecosystem as it is right now has a lot of empty space. When cryptocurrency enters the bear cycle, retail investors’ hunger slows down in a similar way to how many developers begin to look at options that are more known to them.
However, more crucially, not enough programmers are really writing web3 code, which is an issue that can be fixed with long-term incentives. According to a recent analysis by Electric Capital, a venture business that invests in web3 companies, even though more than 34,000 new developers committed code for a web3 project in 2021, it’s still a little portion of the worldwide software engineering base.
To get things started, QuestBook released over 100 courses and started training developers how to write in these languages for free. According to Malolan, the software gained over 18,000 developers in a short period of time. Since gaining a sizable user base, QuestBook has been looking at ways to assist developers in obtaining funding for their ventures.
In an interview, he stated, “That’s something we always kind of vibe with.” For instance, I have never purchased any cryptocurrency in my life. I acquired all of my cryptocurrency by making contributions to open source projects. “We saw, among other things, that individuals weren’t considering cryptocurrency as a full-time occupation during the late December vacation. They considered it to be a side job. We considered many ways to help these folks start generating money on the side so they may become financially mobile and then double down,” he added.
