Imagine a World Where Every Open Source Developer Is a Signer

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TLDR

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• Open source already has identity through cryptographic signatures.
• GPG keys prove authorship and trust across the software supply chain.
• Tea is extending signing identity into a permissionless way to receive value.
• No sign-ups, no approvals, no platforms in the middle.
• This is how you make OSS funding as native as OSS trust, and route value down the chain.

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Imagine a world where every open source developer is already a signer.

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No sign-ups.
No onboarding flows.
No platforms asking for permission.

If you can verify a signature, you can route value.

That world is not hypothetical. Open source already runs on cryptographic identity. Every commit, every release, every maintainer relationship is anchored in keys that prove authorship and trust.

What has been missing is a way for value to move along those same rails.

Tea is building that missing layer.

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Open source already solved identity

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For decades, open source has relied on cryptographic signatures to establish trust.

Developers sign commits.
Maintainers verify releases.
Ecosystems depend on keys, not accounts.

GPG keys are already part of the backbone of software provenance. They answer a simple but critical question: who authored this, and can we trust it.

That same question should be enough to answer another one.

Who should be paid.

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The problem is not intent. It is friction.

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Most people want to support open source. Enterprises depend on it. Developers rely on it daily.

But when it comes time to route value, the system breaks down.

You are asked to create accounts.
You are routed through platforms.
You wait for approvals.
You hope the maintainer opted in.

Each step introduces friction. Most value never moves.

Open source does not need more goodwill.
It needs infrastructure that matches how it already works.

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When projects go dark, everyone pays

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Projects do not have to “die” to become operationally dangerous. They just have to become underfunded, understaffed, or effectively unmaintained.

When a critical maintainer steps down, the blast radius is rarely visible to users in the moment. It shows up later as delayed security fixes, stalled releases, and brittle dependency chains.

The pattern is consistent: the world keeps consuming, but the system that keeps it safe is funded like a hobby.

This is the gap Tea is built to close.

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Centralized signing is becoming a bottleneck

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There is a second pressure building behind the scenes.

As software distribution scales, centralized gatekeepers increasingly become the default center of identity. In app ecosystems, the “trusted” release path is often only trusted because a platform co-signs it.

That model works when the volume is manageable and the gatekeeper can keep up.

But we are entering a world where everyone can produce software faster, more frequently, and with more automation. If centralized co-signing becomes the choke point for what counts as a secure release, it becomes a bottleneck. It also becomes an increasingly concentrated source of authority over what history is valid and what software is considered trustworthy.

Open source already has a better primitive: verifiable signing identity.

What we need is a way to validate history and security beyond centralized stores, and then align incentives around that validation.

This is part of where Tea is going.

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GPG keys as authority, not just proof

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Tea is extending the authority of GPG keys.

Not by replacing them.
Not by abstracting them away.
But by recognizing what they already represent.

If a key can prove authorship, it can also serve as a destination for value.

By linking distribution directly to signing identity, Tea makes it possible to route value to developers without requiring them to sign up, onboard, or manage payment infrastructure.

If a developer already signs their work, they are already part of the system.

This is permissionless by design.

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A new flow of value, without gatekeepers

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This approach changes the shape of open source funding.

Anyone can route value directly to verified contributors.
No central authority decides who qualifies.
No platform controls access.

Tea is able to match hundreds of thousands of developers across the most critical open source projects, and make them reachable by default.

This is not a donation button.
It is an economic primitive.

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Payments can follow the chain, not just the headline maintainer

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The usual funding pattern concentrates value at the top of the funnel, the most visible project, the most famous maintainer, the most central repo.

But the real supply chain is deeper than that.

Once signing identity becomes part of the gating item for security and trusted releases, the value tied to usage can be routed not only to the obvious top projects, but also to the contributors and dependencies further down the chain.

That is how you move from “support your favorites” to “sustain the actual infrastructure.”

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Why this matters for developers

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For maintainers, this removes a silent burden.

You do not need to maintain sponsorship pages.
You do not need to manage payout systems.
You do not need to justify why support matters.

Value can follow usage automatically, transparently, and securely.

Work that is already trusted can finally be rewarded the same way.

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Why this matters for enterprises

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Enterprises already rely on open source at massive scale. What they lack is a clean, auditable way to support the software they depend on without navigating fragmented funding mechanisms.

A system anchored in verifiable signing identity provides a path to route value along dependency chains, tied to real contributors and real code.

This opens the door to new approaches to sustainability, compliance, and supply chain risk, without adding operational overhead.

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Breaking old distribution heuristics

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Most funding systems reward visibility, not importance.

Tea breaks that pattern.

A portion of every transaction on the Tea network will, in perpetuity, be committed to distribution to open source contributors, routed through cryptographic identity.

No favoritism.
No opaque criteria.
No gatekeepers.

Just verified work, rewarded.

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Imagine what this unlocks

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Imagine development tools that can validate signatures as work is produced.
Imagine trusted releases that do not depend on a single centralized co-signer.
Imagine value flowing at the same speed as contribution, and reaching deeper than the top of the stack.

This is not a distant future.

It is the system we are getting ready to launch.

Open source has carried the internet long enough without an economy. Its moment is coming.