Zero Donations in Open Source? Dev Makes $11K/Day via Memecoin
adamamcbride · x · 2026-08-02
An open-source developer shared a monetization experiment: despite massive downloads for his terminal search tool, traditional tip jars earned only $1 in 11 months. After a cold email, he allowed a memecoin to be launched with his project's name, collecting a cut of trading fees that brought in roughly $11,000 in a single day. However, this produced zero pull requests or community code contributions. The author documented the process to explore if this could be a viable new funding rail for the open-source ecosystem.
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