Getting started
Why not just GitHub?
Honest comparison against the things you might use today: GitHub Sponsors, Gitcoin, Gitbank, Gitlawb, and tipping bots. Where each ends, GITSEA begins.
What each one actually does
| Layer | What it ships | What it doesn't |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Sponsors | One-time and monthly tips, Stripe rails. | No splits, no credit, no agents, custodial. |
| Open Collective | Fiscal hosting, transparent budgets. | Manual, off-chain, no programmable primitives. |
| Gitcoin Bounties | One-shot bounties, quadratic funding rounds. | Round-based, no recurring revenue, no agent layer. |
| Gitbank | /pay and /bounty in GitHub comments on Base. | Settlement only — no credit, no royalties, no yield. |
| Gitlawb | Decentralized git (IPFS, libp2p, MCP for agents). | Storage and ops layer — money layer is bolted on. |
| GITSEA | The eight primitives. | Not a git host, not a custodian, not an L1. |
Where each one ends
GitHub Sponsors
Stops at "I gave you $5." No splits between co-maintainers. No credit history. No way for AI agents to participate. Custodial — GitHub is the bank.
Gitcoin
Stops at "we ran a bounty round." Brilliant for funding events, weak for the daily economic life of a project. No primitives for ongoing revenue, credit, or agent participation.
Gitbank
Stops at "we settled the bounty on Base." GITSEA starts there — we add royalty streams, credit scores, collateral lending, insurance, prediction markets, and the agent credit network. Same edge. Same Base. Eight more rungs up.
Gitlawb
Stops at "your repo is mirrored and an agent pushed a PR." We don't compete with Gitlawb — we integrate with it. Run on Gitlawb if you want sovereign git; the financial primitives sit on top either way.
The same example, four ways
On GitHub alone. Maintainer thanks contributors in the release notes. Nothing changes financially.
On Open Collective. Maintainer goes to the dashboard, manually opens a budget, requests $400 from the project treasury, splits it across 12 people via 12 invoices. Pays Stripe fees. Three weeks.
On Gitbank. Maintainer types /pay 400 usdc @alice @bob @carol …. Done in 30 seconds. No splits config — they typed each name. Next PR, they type it all again.
On GITSEA.
- PR #318 merges.
- A merge fee streams in from downstream usage (it was already streaming — this is a normal Tuesday).
- The protocol reads
asset.toml, splits the fee 12 ways by declared weight, settles atomically in one Base transaction. - Each contributor's credit score updates by their proportional share of the merge.
- The merge insurance pool ticks up by 1.4 bps (a few cents) of fee.
- A PR prediction market on whether this PR will need a revert within 30 days settles open.
No human typed anything. No spreadsheet. No invoice. The same flow runs for the next PR, and the next.
When to use what
- You just want to tip someone. GitHub Sponsors or Coinbase Commerce.
- You're running a funding round. Gitcoin.
- You want programmable bounties inside GitHub comments. Gitbank or GITSEA's GitHub bot.
- You want sovereign git infra. Gitlawb.
- You want code itself to be an asset. GITSEA.
These are not mutually exclusive. We expect projects to use GitHub for hosting, Gitlawb for mirror/sovereignty, and GITSEA for the financial layer on top of both.
Why on Base
- Cheapest mainstream L2 settlement (sub-cent per merge today).
- Coinbase distribution puts wallets in the hands of normies and AI agents.
- Already where the dev-tools crypto narrative lives (Gitbank, Gitlawb, bankr.bot).
- L2 finality is sufficient for code economics; we don't need DA guarantees of an L1.
What we won't ship
- A token bridge to L1. $GSEA is Base-native.
- A custodial mode. Not on the roadmap, not coming.
- A NFT speculation layer for repos. Repo tokens are economic instruments, not JPEGs.
- A walled garden. Every primitive is open-source, auditable, forkable.