🆕 A Community of Everyone: How Open Source Powers the New Internet

Open source drives crypto's ethos, fostering collaboration, transparency, and innovation.

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You build better together. Open-source has been at the heart of crypto’s ethos since the very beginning. Bitcoin is open source, Ethereum is open source, Cosmos is open source. Right from the beginning, crypto has been about community - and that extends to the development level. You, reading this right now, are free to use, reproduce, and add to the code of the majority of crypto projects in the space.

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It’s a stark difference to the current world web we use today. And for many it can be hard to wrap your head around. Most companies' code is closed-source. You can’t peek behind the curtain and see how it works. In a world of IP law and copyright, that makes natural sense. They made it, they get to profit from it - why should they let anyone else use it?

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But the idea behind open source is as old as software development and computers themselves. By freely sharing and collaborating on software, early computer scientists were able to power the innovation that led to our modern tech-fuelled economy. The rise of the internet in the 1990s led to a new flourishing of collaborative innovation, and to the term ‘open source’ being coined. The term itself is an expansion of the ‘free software movement’ of the 1980s. 

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The Benefits of Open Source

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The benefits of open source are many. With the code open to all, security vulnerabilities are (usually) very speedily found. Talent from all over the world can contribute to the project, and on their own terms with their own vision, rather than being mandated by corporate suits who don’t know any better. New ideas can be implemented by coders who are passionate about it without any risk to the integrity of the project itself.

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The creativity and diversity in an open source project can lead to innovation that radically redefines the project, even away from the vision of the original creator. Sometimes, teams diverge - and this is okay, even encouraged. This is called a ‘fork’, and represents when a codebase that started as one project becomes another.

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Open Source is Ultra Beneficial to Finance

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Open source is particularly effective in the realm of finance. It offers numerous advantages, especially in the realms fintech, and white label crypto exchanges. Firstly, it accelerates the detection of security vulnerabilities, crucial in safeguarding financial assets. Additionally, it attracts global talent, allowing diverse contributions aligned with individual visions, rather than rigid corporate directives. This fosters creativity and innovation, enabling the reimagining of projects beyond their original scope. In the context of white label crypto exchanges, open source principles promote adaptability and may even lead to the creation of new, divergent platforms through forks, all contributing to a dynamic and evolving fintech landscape.

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What is GitHub?

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GitHub is the defacto global ‘library’ for all this activity. In its own documentation, it’s ‘a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration’. Built on the foundation of Git, a version control system created by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, GitHub serves as a central hub for developers worldwide. Using GitHub, coders can access repositories of projects all over the world, start a new branch or chapter in a particular project (add their own code), make changes and then ‘push’ them to GitHub (called ‘commits’), i.e, suggest adding the changes they made. 

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Then, it’s up to whoever's maintaining the codebase whether to ‘merge’ this new code and make it part of the main codebase of the project. Through this method, GitHub lets teams who don’t know each other collaborate easily and effectively, without any risk to the main function of the codebase itself. 

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HollaEx believes firmly in the power of open source innovation. We've received over 🌟 345 stars on GitHub and we are one of the longest running open-source exchange software for cryptocurrencies. Here's our GitHub repository. We have contributors all over the world from market-making trading bot creators, to fiat on and off ramping and even banks all working in collboration to help our white label exchange software. New functionality, ideas, security, and efficiency is added everyday by our community of developers all over the world. We salute you all - without you, the HollaEx project would not be where it is today. Open source leads to a world of transparency, shared achievement, and new horizons. If you’re a coder who wants to get involved, we’d love to have you. If run a business, you know our services are the product of talented developers, each adding their own branch to our ever growing tree.