Wireline, a company with an all-star team from Google, Amazon, IBM and Salesforce, is raising the largest open source developer fund through an ICO, as well as building an innovative App Exchange, a server app marketplace which promises to become the definitive “package manager” for the cloud.
Wireline is a project that can affect thousands of users and developers. It aims to build an App Exchange where open source developers will be able to monetize business class projects. Introduced as “The App Store For The Serverless Future”, the Wireline App Exchange (read the White Paper) will be a marketplace for business to discover, test and integrate microservices that they can combine to build customized software solutions.
In essence, developers will build and upload building blocks of code (called 'Wires') to the App Exchange. These ‘wires’ will be fabricated so that they are interoperable and can be connected to larger applications. Other users and companies will be able to search for wires/blocks they need and use them as components in their real business applications, directly from their code.
This model is not new to software developers, who are used to work with package managers, packages and components. The difference is that Wireline promises the whole thing to be effortless with one-click installs and full-featured APIs. It will also be “infinitely scalable” without servers and operating system costs.
WRL: A Token For Rewarding Developers
Another fundamental difference is that the token for all transactions inside this impressive marketplace will be the “WRL,” Wireline’s own ERC-20 Ethereum blockchain token. WRL will be the unit of account for the Wireline App Exchange. Developers will also be rewarded in WRL for components that are useful and popular, similar to an App Store.
Wireline has already minted 100% of a total of 3 billion WRL tokens; no further coins will be ever created. Valued at 1USD = 10 WRL, the funds raised from the token sale will be used for technical development. Wireline has set the funding goal at 20 million dollars.
To seed the development of App Exchange, Wireline launches a multi-million Developer Fund which will hold all WRL tokens. Once the token sale is complete, the Fund will disburse $20 million to Wireline to execute the App Exchange development plan.
According to Wireline, the Fund will also be investing in developers who build high quality ‘wires’ for applications and will also act as safeguard mechanism for developers to receive their payments from App Exchange. To do that, Wireline will draw up to 2.5% of the unsold WRL tokens every quarter. The tokens will be allocated by Wireline “to independent developers (and other participants) who are working on core parts of the ecosystem.”
Wireline's founding and investor team is impressive, to say the least. People like Lucas Geiger, Rich Burdon, Massimo Di Pierro, Shehab Hamad, Paulo Kaiser, Bruno Orsini, Marc Herson, Saul Hudson are engineers and entrepreneurs who work or have worked at Google, IBM, Sony, Reuters, Yahoo, Amazon and other Fortune-500 companies.
Deal with Qtum
Wireline future is promising. It has already inked a deal with Qtum, the open-source blockchain project developed by the Singapore-based Qtum Foundation. They will cooperate to create the Wireline App Store so that enterprises can consume developer microservices at scale using blockchain at its core.
Interested parties can join Wireline’s marketplace here
Registration for participation in WRL Token sale is now open.