App Coins
= cryptocurrency used by Assembly profit-sharing platform for open source production
Description
Ben Popper:
"Assembly is leveraging technology from the world of Bitcoin to help create a shared ownership structure for each product. "App Coins (the ownership in a product on the blockchain) is not equity in the traditional company sense," explained Assembly founder Matthew Deiters. "They can't be transferred or sold. Instead they are used to determine an individual’s monthly earnings as well as verifiable ownership control used in voting decisions."
Each project has a core team the brings the original idea to the Assembly platform. That team decides what tasks need to be done and how many App Coins they are worth. Anyone can contribute towards that work without permission, the model borrowed from open source, and just like many big open source projects, the core team approves or declines the final work. Assembly serves as the platform for all this and also a financial and legal steward.
"Technically these aren't companies. They aren't independent entities but instead a collective of people that built a software product on Assembly," Deiters wrote via email. "We also just handle what's necessary so they can operate as a distributed business (e.g. taxes, finances, etc). I like to think of them as a partnership since each contributor has a seat at the table, can help where they are best, and have access to all the operating information." (http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/21/7258667/assembly-collaborative-work-open-source)