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What is Trustless OSS?

What is Trustless OSS?

Trustless OSS (TOSS) lets maintainers attach USDC rewards to GitHub issues and have them pay out automatically when the work merges — without a bounty platform sitting in the middle of the money.

Funds live in a per-repository escrow contract on Stellar. A merged PR that closes a labeled issue triggers an on-chain release to the contributor. You keep working in issues and PRs exactly as you do today; the automation handles everything on-chain.

The problem it solves

Traditional bounty platforms custody your money, take a cut, and ask everyone to trust their payout process. Contributors often can’t tell whether a bounty is actually funded until they’ve done the work. TOSS removes the custodian: the escrow contract holds the funds, and its rules — not a company — decide when they release.

How it’s different

  • GitHub-native. Labels create bounties, assignment and merge drive the lifecycle, and a bot handles edge cases through comment commands. No separate workspace to manage work in.
  • Non-custodial. You sign deploy and fund transactions in your own wallet. The platform never holds keys. Releases are on-chain operations gated by verified state.
  • Automatic. A bounty advances itself: it parks when a wallet is missing, resumes when it arrives, retries transient failures with backoff, and never double-pays. Manual retry is an escape hatch, not part of the flow.
  • Verifiable. Every bounty’s state is on-chain. A contributor can confirm the escrow is funded before starting.

Who it’s for

Open source maintainers who want to fund specific issues, and contributors who want to get paid in USDC for merged work. Both sides need a Stellar wallet; everything else happens through GitHub.

The lifecycle in one paragraph

A maintainer connects a repo (installs the GitHub App), deploys an escrow contract, and funds it with USDC. They label an issue rewarded + a tier (or manual with an amount). A contributor is assigned and connects a Stellar wallet, which locks the reward as an on-chain milestone. The contributor opens a PR that closes the issue; the maintainer merges it; the escrow releases the USDC automatically. For a detailed walkthrough with the money-safety rules, see How payouts work.

Pick your path:

New to Stellar/USDC? Start with the Glossary.

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