GitPOAP Raises $4.28M To Build Out On-Chain Credentials

GitPOAP has raised $4.28M in a pre-seed round to grow its credentialing platform that lets projects issue POAPs to recognize contributors on GitHub, the Microsoft-owned developer platform used by over 83M users including most web3 projects.

GitPOAP has been used to issue POAPs — NFTs created using the Proof-of-Attendance Protocol — for contributions to 617 repositories crucial to the Ethereum ecosystem, including the Ethereum protocol and client teams, popular DeFi projects like Yearn, Gitcoin and Gnosis, and infrastructure projects including Solidity and OpenZeppelin.

The funding round was led by Inflection and Libertus Capital with participation from notable angel investors, including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and POAP Founder Patricio Worthalter.

On-Chain Professional Reputation

GitPOAP hopes to build a credentialing system by bringing engineers’ professional reputations on-chain. This could be incredibly helpful for both individual engineers as well as DAOs and web3 companies that could look at these credentials when making hiring decisions. GitPOAP is available to any open-source project.

“Many DAOs are currently relying on token holdings for their governance but imagine if you could easily poll the people who are actually contributing to your project,” said GitPOAP co-founder and CEO Colfax Selby in a press release. “Project funding is also inherently difficult – wouldn’t it be nice to have a unified and verified record of who has contributed, so you can channel the funds effectively?”

Skylar Weaver, a member of the Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon team, said, “contribution-based POAPs were very helpful in identifying active builders in the community, which are exactly the folks we want at Devcon.”

GitPOAP is not the first company to work on crypto-native credentials but is the first to integrate natively with GitHub. POAPs have proved popular with web3 users looking to commemorate their experiences in the space.

Education platform Rabbithole rewards learners with crypto while web3 course platform 101.xyz gives users non-transferrable NFTs called soulbound tokens that can augment their on-chain reputations.