Introduction

Tea Protocol is a decentralized open-source software platform project built on the Layer 2 blockchain Base. It aims to create an open, public, and stable registry for all open-source software and to help individual developers monetize their open-source software.

The Tea Protocol adopts a novel consensus mechanism called Proof of Contribution. This algorithm evaluates open-source software projects’ value, status, and impact. Proof of Contribution assigns each project a dynamic score, called teaRank, used to distribute rewards.

Project Background

Tea Protocol secured $8 million in seed funding in 2022, led by Binance, with participation from Woodstock, Lattice Capital, Darma Cash, XBTO Humla Ventures, RockTree Capital, Coral DeFi, and SVK Crypto. In December of the same year, it raised an additional $8.9 million in an extended seed round, with investments from WAX, StrongBlock, Betaworks, Percival VC, and other institutions, bringing the total funding to $16.9 million. The testnet was launched in February 2024, attracting further market attention.

Max Howell, co-founder and CEO of Tea Protocol, has extensive experience in both Web2 and Web3 open-source software and is the creator of Homebrew, one of the most widely contributed open-source software programs globally.

Key Components of Tea Protocol

Tea Protocol is a decentralized technology protocol that employs a novel consensus mechanism called Proof of Contribution. Its primary components are the package manager, decentralized registry, and storage system.

Package Manager

Four essential tools for an engineer developing an application are the browser, terminal, editor, and package manager. The package manager controls the tools and frameworks developers need to build products. A software package manager knows all the open-source software dependencies required for a package or application to run from the topmost to the bottom layer. Each project and every package version records all necessary components and their corresponding versions in detail.

Decentralized Registry

Every package manager has an inherent package registry containing redundant metadata. This registry might sometimes include information that differs from the project manifest, allowing bad actors to inject malicious code without the user’s knowledge. Tea Protocol uses blockchain technology to implement a decentralized registry. As an immutable distributed ledger, blockchain ensures the security, verifiability, and integrity of all version data, preventing malicious actions.

With the rapid advancement of technology, hacking techniques are also increasingly sophisticated, making software programs vulnerable to malicious attacks. Therefore, under the premise of a decentralized registry, Tea Protocol also incorporates incentive and penalty mechanisms to ensure the security of the software supply chain.

Storage System

Open-source packages provide a wide range of functionalities. The Tea Protocol will be cross-compatible with major package managers such as Homebrew, npm, APT, Crate, PyPI, RubyGems, and pkgx. This means developers can continue using the package managers they are familiar with to retrieve and manage packages while leveraging the decentralized registry offered by the Tea Protocol to ensure the security and immutability of versions. This cross-compatibility will facilitate the smooth integration of the Tea Protocol into existing package management ecosystems, providing developers and users with more flexible and reliable options.

Currently, most open-source software development is hindered by a lack of incentive mechanisms. With proper economic incentives and reward mechanisms, more developers would be empowered to build, improve, and update open-source software, benefiting the entire technology sector. The vision of the Tea Protocol is to empower the entire open-source community, ensuring that contributors to the foundational tools of the Internet receive support.

The Tea Protocol introduces “Proof of Contribution,” a novel consensus mechanism designed to quantify the impact of all projects within the open-source system. Proof of Contribution assigns a dynamic score, called teaRank, based on each open-source project’s internal positioning and usage within the broader open-source ecosystem over time. This approach benefits foundational software layers, often less visible to the public and attracting less interest. It extends the reward mechanism to ensure all project components are recognized for their contributions.

Proof of Contribution is designed to identify and isolate spam packages and ensure that only impactful projects receive fair rewards. The details of the Proof of Contribution algorithm will be the subject of a dedicated technical paper.

TEA Token Economy Model

Anyone holding TEA tokens can stake them on OSS (open-source software) projects registered in the Tea Protocol. The Tea web application provides the staking process for all protocol participants.

Total Supply of TEA Tokens: 10 Billion

• 51.4% allocated to the Tea ecosystem and development
• 18.6% allocated to the development and expansion of the Tea Protocol
• 12.7% allocated to early project supporters
• 11.0% allocated to private placements
• 3.20% allocated to market liquidity
• 3.00% allocated to public sales

Source: tea.xyz

The emission schedule of the TEA token determines the rate at which tokens enter the circulating supply. At the TGE (Token Generation Event), approximately 19% of the maximum token supply was unlocked and circulating. Nearly half of the tokens circulating at TGE were allocated to the DAO and used for governance.

Source: tea.xyz

TEA Token Benefits

Four categories of participants eligible to receive TEA tokens as part of the protocol’s incentive issuance include:

• OSS project maintainers
• Tea community members
• Project supporters
• Vulnerability reporters

As the native token of the Tea Protocol, TEA provides users with several benefits:

• Users can stake TEA tokens to support specific packages.
• Users can contribute to the security of the software supply chain by challenging and reviewing packages to report bugs or vulnerabilities.
• Users can support OSS projects and protect the software supply chain by staking, reviewing, and reporting bugs or vulnerabilities in project codebases, rewarding open-source developers of registered projects, and participating in the governance of the Tea Protocol.

Future Development

As the Tea Protocol system matures, the community will govern and promote changes and expansions within the Tea Protocol system. The plans for Tea Protocol are as follows, targeting different stakeholders:

For Wholesalers

The open-source software community continuously creates new products, with the development of each software and package driving upstream and downstream growth, causing frequent changes in staking rates and rewards. Tea Protocol plans to develop a system for dynamically monitoring the staking rate of each project and rebalancing the staking of TEA tokens according to the supporters’ standards.

For Software Royalties

Package maintainers may decide to transfer their rewards to one or more developers. The package maintainers and their partners must decide the governance of such transfers without interference from TEA. Tea Protocol needs to provide tools to make these transfers in full or in part, and to enable staking rewards to be automatically allocated to multiple accounts through multiple network participants, a single account controlled by one participant, or using static or dynamic ratios.

Reward Distribution Among Multiple Maintainers

Maintaining a software package relies on the work of multiple development teams. Before TEA rewards start flowing, teams should consider automatically distributing value among themselves. The distribution method must be decided by the maintainers, as they are best qualified to evaluate contributions and determine how rewards should be allocated. To achieve this, each team (or multiple teams) can establish their own Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to automatically distribute rewards or deploy more complex systems that determine appropriate value allocation based on external factors, such as voting by all DAO members or time allocation based on ongoing contributions and successful bounty completions.

Handling Software Package Forks

Forking is considered necessary but is largely underutilized. Forking can be a powerful tool for developing competitive features regarding functionality, performance, security, or attracting attention. While forks can be useful, they must also acknowledge the original contributions. To address this, the Tea community might enhance the system in the future to require declarations of forks or even detect them when packages are submitted. Undeclared forks identified by auditors could result in the partial token slashing of the Steeping rewards, transferring them to the original package maintainers and rewarding the auditor who discovered the fork.

Managing Dependencies in Running and Building Software

Tea may not distinguish between build and runtime dependencies when distributing rewards at launch. However, the Tea community strongly demands such a distinction. In that case, the community can propose enhancements to the Steeping reward distribution algorithm to account for the importance of each dependency and its value contribution to dependent packages. These proposals will be voted on and implemented based on community decisions.

Conclusion

The emergence of Tea Protocol addresses the long-standing issue of insufficient compensation for open-source developers. By bridging the gaps between different programming communities and open-sourcing the entire ecosystem, Tea Protocol is revolutionizing sustainable development for open-source developers, ensuring their contributions are rewarded and recognized.

Tea Protocol’s official launch of the V1.0 mainnet is expected in June, and the TEA token, backed by Binance’s leading investment, is also anticipated to be listed soon. This presents significant potential for both its market value and token price. Although Tea Protocol is not yet live, the zero-threshold points tasks offer an excellent opportunity for everyone to participate actively.