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title: Notes from call with Ric Moo of Ethers.js

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# Notes from call with Ric Moo of Ethers.js


- Ric participated in Drips V1 and was excited about it, but feels like he hasn't heard anything about Drips for a while.

- By far his most success has been with Gitcoin

- Ethers started running as an app in an iframe. Then he made it into a library. Early on, building anything on web3 was super painful. To do anything you would first have to download web3 and Geth and sync a node.

- Ethers.js started as a way to avoid that pain and have it as a library.

- When he first started he was doing random contract work. He wrote a web-based wallet. That was an early claim to fame.

- He was unfunded for years, living very frugally. Then he started getting grants, first one grant from the EF, then another grant from the EF. Then Scott from Gitcoin came to him and he made $5k in the first Gitcoin round. Plus random contracts. Then he started making a lot of money in each round. Rounds got bigger and bigger. He had a round that was $80k. Then the EF started funding him as well.

- He first connected to the EF through meetups with Vitalik in Toronto. Also met some others at Devcon 2. Someone forked Ethers.js and got to go on mainstage and he was frustrated by that, but didn't let it phase him too much. Kenneth from the EF got in touch with him. Initially they gave them money in fiat, which was what he wanted.

- He still gets fiat from the EF and uses it to pay rent... and taxes. He has a lot of concern about taxes and wants to make sure to pay them. Doesn't want to get in trouble with the government.

- In terms of Gitcoin, Scott reached out to him. He didn't have to do much to campaigning. He never really has campaigned for himself... feels that it is somewhat antithetical to the process. Feels exploitative to campaign and it feels somehow against the ethos. Like the most important thing is for his time to be spent on development. He's not a marketing person.

- He has just recently set up Github Sponsors. He was originally accepted in the beta but never got around to setting it up. But then Quick Node wanted to sponsor him and Sponsors turned out to be a convenient way for him to get paid by them, so he set it up. His only real sponsor is Quick Node, but he has had 2 small one-time sponsors.

- It's only been a month though. He may try to promote it more in the future. 

- He actually likes getting paid in fiat, mainly because he needs to pay taxes. He wants to keep the government happy.... just wants to pay his taxes.

- However he thinks a "mixed" system might be interesting (i.e. crypto or fiat).

- He doesn't expect that Gitcoin (or any other web3 project) will take care of creating an offramp for him. He realizes that with crypto this is your responsibility in general. And so he has been okay with accepting crypto from Gitcoin.

- Ele: "I noticed that all of your tiers on Sponsors are just 'thank you', basically". Ric: I'm not sure what benefits to give. A lot of them, like advanced access to code, seem antithetical. If there is a bug out there and he is holding on to the bug fix, that does not seem right.

- He tried doing swag at one point, but the shipping costs and time killed him. Gated docs also seemed antithetical to him. 

- Andrew: have you explored giving prioirity to certain issues based on sponsorship? Ric: not really, but he is interested. Has considered doing the Etherscan model of adding support to Ethers for new wacky EVM networks with higher priority. This is something he is interested to explore.

- The new version of Ethers incldues a plugin system to support networks that have oddball features like Polygon (different hashing algorithms, etc.).

- Ric worries about anything that looks like a cash grab and doesn't want to upset his community. Especially working with some of these EVM networks, which feel like cash grabs themselves.

- Almost all of his issues come up with BSC.

- In general he wants community feedback around what good or fair and what doesn't.

- He has enough high-priority issues that he doesn't want to change issue priority based on a supporter's preferences. Or in other words, he feels like he knows what the right priority of the issue is and so to change that for money feels unethical.

- Ele: have you considered charging for access to yourself? Ric: I've considered it... I have a Discord. People tend to ask too many questions there. In general he doesn't have very much time and time is the scarcest resource, so he feels like he can't really afford the time. In the end he doesn't feel like this is ethically right ether. "I'm just not a business guy". He just likes to get things fixed and get them built. He thinks charging for his time could be a good idea, but he just wants to help people in the end.

- He thinks that there are probably big companies or people out there who would support him, but he doesn't know how to reach him and he's not a cold calling kind of guy.

- Andrew: anything you dislike about Gitcoin or Github Sponsors? Ric: with Gitcoin he doesn't like the unreliability. The amounts jump around a lot between rounds. It could be $5k or $80k. Makes it really hard to financially plan. He would prefer to have less volatility in the amount he gets. Doesn't like the uncertainty. With Github Sponsors he just hasn't used it enough to to know about problems... he hasn't withdrawn funds yet.

- He has actually created an endowment to maintain Ethers if something happens and he is putting money into the endowment to make sure it will survive.

- He's working on a new hardware wallet. Would love to give some funds to his dependencies. He loves that Apache and other big FOSS projects exists. He is just super inspired by them.

- He is really motivated by the dependency funding idea. Would love to drip funds to his dependencies for his projects.

- If he could set up Drips for Ethers, he has 6 dependencies. One of them he has donated a bit to already. One of them is a Microsoft project and they probably don't need any money. Probably 4-5 projects he would donate to. For the hardware wallet project, it would also probably be 3-4 projects. He would probably Split 25% total to his dependencies for each of his projects. 

- He thinks that package.json doesn't fully capture the real dependency tree. He would prefer to just pick the handful of dependencies that matter the most and who need the money.

- It would be cool if you didn't have to create anything on-chain, but could just do it in your .json file directly. He's not sure exactly how it would work, but he finds this idea.



















