With the name being a derivative of Git and Blockchain, HitChain is a new global decentralized, autonomous organization based on blockchain technology. It is a project that has been developed with a thorough emphasis on rewarding developers and with the intention of cultivating a decentralized autonomous blockchain developer community. The project has lofty ambitions of eventually surpassing GitHub, as the prominent open source platform through its application of blockchain technology, resulting in much more productive, democratic and autonomous Open Source environment.

Existing Open Source Ecosystem Issues 🔧

The problems within the current fabric of open source ecosystems are various and have been prevalent for a sustained period of time now. Developers globally, are pouring their blood, sweat, tears and frankly their heart and soul into these projects, which are substantially responsible for the software in the current modern technological economy. Despite this momentous effort, all developers want in return is help keeping these projects flourishing and continually improving them. Their effort is arguably a collective display of decentralized voluntarism and truly represents the ethos that blockchain technology is now trying to achieve.

In her seminal report in 2016, entitled ‘Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure,’ Nadia Eghbal, provided a comprehensive analysis of not only the challenges faced by open source, but also a issued rallying cry encouraging users of open source to be much more attentive about the economics and issuing a clear breakdown of the critical actions required to allow these projects to preserve indefinitely 🙌🏻.

Centralization

Despite the code being accessible and somewhat free, large parts of codes remain proprietary, as such developers often have to sign agreements and surrender the rights to their code. This domination by major players, quite often corporations such as Apple or Intel, is frequent throughout the open source environment. A large number of open source projects will not have a sustained distributed community around them and are reliant on single corporations for financial support and to achieve objectives according to their roadmaps 👀. Having an open source license to a large codebase isn’t a foundation of long-term sustainability of a project, especially if the vast chunks of information is under the ownership singular corporations. The consolidation of prominent technology companies is an issue that needs to be closely assessed: A handful of companies may end up owning all important open source code. Distributed and decentralized copyright ownership would help alleviate these risks.

Unfairness 🙁

Structurally, open source’s best advantage- its desire for democracy- also results in this being its weakness. Many projects are very often a public code repository to which there are regular contributions from groups of people. There is no obvious legal structure, or clear owners and leaders. This results in companies using open source systems but not contributing to them. Developers are often individual or small groups who work on open source projects and encourage other developers to contribute in their spare time to what they use. Open source can only survive if people give back and if corporations or other users constantly take without reciprocity this greatly hinders its chance of sustainability. If maintenance and developments are not attended to, projects and software systems will flounder and disappear.

Discontinuance

When combining the above problems as well as other issues such as developer burnout and ineffective intellectual protection, obsolescence of massive parts of open source ecosystems every year is a major issue. Many projects go obsolete due to the lack of developers working on them. When acknowledging the tremendous effort required maintaining and developing new codes, the issue of developers leaving and those codes not being updated and going extinct is a real possibility 👎.

“Either humans are irrational or they don’t just follow money. Clearly there’s another motivation for me here. It’s a labor of love. I could close this project tomorrow and be done with it if I wanted to, but I’ve been doing it for 5 years and I don’t want to see that happen.”

Who Are HitChain And What’s Their Solution?

HitChain has been released with the interests of developers at the center. It aims to truly tackle the problems stated beforehand and establish a status quo with a blockchain developer community within a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO). Developers using the HitChain platform will have their output acknowledged and compensated for under the HitChain hosting agreements and Hit protocols. Anyone who contributes and uses the HitChain platform will be regarded as a community member, thus removing the need to hold HIT tokens for eligibility. As stated in their whitepaper HitChain’s goals are:

1. The World’s Largest Software Development Collaboration Platform
2. Products Saved in Decentralized Form
3. Automatic Intellectual Property Protection
4. Developer’s Comprehensive Technical Credit System
5. Monetization of Developers’ Works
6. Transaction History is Transparent and Independent
7. Autonomous Community

HitChain aims to achieve their goals by tackling the most prominent issues within the developer community; unhindered code development, the protection of intellectual rights, protection for code distribution and transparency regarding any trading relating to developers works. By combining Git protocol and blockchain technology, they aim to establish a platform with a polished set of rules concerning the developer worries. The HitChain platform will be made up of four vital components:

1. Hitchain Cryptocurrency Infrastructure

2. Hitchain Infrastructure

3. Hitchain Development and Trading Community

4. Hitchain Applications

Presently Git is the most prominent code management protocol for software development. Major open source ecosystems such as GitHub and GitLab are all implemented via the Git protocol; however, it is hindered by fundamental weaknesses such a large file support and slow access to large-scale small files.

HitChain plans to introduce Merkel Tree 🌳 File Processing as the solution to GitHub’s distinctive flaws. The Merkel Tree root will be retrived via untrusted sources. The Merkel Tree will then be checked via trusted sources and if the Merkel Tree is compromised, HitChain will get another Merkel Tree from a different source until a trusted Merkel Tree is received.

HitChain recently announced their initial listing on Huobi. HitChain marked their first global listing on Huobi Global with trading pairs, HIT/BTC and HIT/ETH, to be available from August 3rd onwards. To take part in the HitChain global listing please follow this link to proceed. Huobi will also be facilitating a ‘HitChain Trading Campaign Rewards for TOP50’. From 10:00, August 3rd to 10:00, August 9th (GMT+8), the first 100,000 HT holders who log onto Huobi Global will receive an airdrop of 100 HIT each. A total of 10 million HIT will be airdropped and the amount is limited. Airdropped tokens will be issued to Huobi accounts at a later date.💊

👍🏼Why Should I Invest?

Besides the glaring issues that HitChain is attempting to tackle and their highly adept processes, HitChain has been founded and being advised by an experienced and knowledgeable team. These include:

Jiang Li

The chairman, director and founder or HitChain and currently the CTO of Microsoft China. He has a good relationship in international IT, having built up a deep and close network of contacts within the industry. In the subject of Blockchain, he has experience in Cloud Computing and Open Source Ecosystem. Is the overall overseer of the HitChain strategy and responsible for trying to convince developers globally to join HitChain community.

Leon Li

The director of the HitChain foundation and open source expert at Intel. Has the distinction of being the first recognized APAC Engineer in China. He has served in many technical positions on a variety of global soft companies; will be responsible for the construction of the open source system within HitChain.

Besides these two members, the rest of the team will be composed up of global open source veterans and experts with backgrounds in Telexistence, OSChina and IBM.

As well as this adapt team, their advisors include:

Jia Tian

He is currently the Chief Scientist at Cortexlabs.ai and was an early adopter of Bitcoin. Has a major in distributed systems and was also the Chief Scientist of the first Bitcoin fund in China, Bitfund. Was an early supporter of Zerocoin, which later became Zcash.

Haobo Ma

The founder of Aelf and an expert within the blockchain industry. Currently a member of, Blockchain Experts Committee of the Chinese Institute of Electronics and Blockchain Experts Committee of China Federation.

Institutional Backing 🏛

A staple in the modern blockchain climate for positive success is very often to have favorable backing via institutional investment and HitChain very well has several well-renowned organisations offering their backing. These include:
Both Tian and Ma are expert advisers and are highly experienced and well regarded in China within the blockchain industry. In addition, there are several other advisors all who various experience and knowledge in the field of financial investment, management and computer science. Having advisors with such caliber only further encourages HitChain’s potential for success.

Bitmain

World’s largest bitcoin mining company. Has absolute dominance over cryptocurrency mining chips; one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Huobi Capital

The Investment arm of the Huobi Group. Huobi Pro is currently ranked the fourth highest traded exchange by volume.

OK Blockchain Capital

The Investment arm of OKEX. A hugely prominent crypto exchange currently ranked third highest traded exchange according to volume; has previously been first.

Draper Dragon

The investment fund owned by Tim Draper. A highly renowned and successful investor in Silicon Valley, he is well known around mainstream circles for his uber-bullish position on bitcoin and having a net worth of over $1 billion.

The involvement of such influential organisations within the crypto sphere suggests that HitChain is a project that many have high hopes for. It is also a project that many should be involved in via Huobi.

Technicians recently investigated the source code of HitChain’s smart contract and found a code which is complex but bulletproof; simply exemplifying the ‘Code is the Law’ moniker. As well as this, following HitChain’s public release of their source code on GitHub, it has received acclaim from developers around the world, receiving 342 stars globally and has 718 commits from 15 contributors. 🏆

✅In MY personal opinion, is it worth investing in HitChain? Well, there’s no doubt commendation has to be given for the team in tackling a very serious but clearly underexposed issue within open source ecosystems. Many developers are leaving and large corporations are slowly consolidating their influence on coding projects. This goes against what blockchain technology is trying to achieve. However, despite the positivity in the issues being tackled and the very upbeat reaction their source coding, there is a lack of community hype for the project. The community and team are not active and social channels have minimum followers. But, this probably denotes the team is more focused on developing the tech right now and will most likely plan a marketing push after having strong foundations to release from. Their tech is very clear and proficient while the team has good experience all around. So as such, from a personal point of view, this would be a project I would invest in 🤘.

Disclaimer: Please only take this information as my OWN opinion and should not be regarded as financial advise in any situation. Please remember to DYOR before making any decisions.

♂️ Hi, my name’s Sal.
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