The Smart Contract Engineer Building Open Source’s Financial Future

The world runs on open-source code — code that’s freely available for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. But one of its greatest benefits is also its greatest flaw: no one pays for it. This quandary has resulted in a reality where much of the world’s infrastructure is built on the code of uncompensated developers.

Sharif Elfouly, known professionally as shafu, is determined to correct this imbalance. As a founding engineer at Merit Systems, he’s building payment infrastructure that could right this wrong and finally see open-source developers compensated for their valuable work.

From City Infrastructure To Digital Foundations

After studying computer science and economics, Sharif Elfouly started his career in Germany as a machine learning engineer, developing software that helped cities detect faults in roads and public spaces.

But soon, he began to feel limited by traditional software development environments.

“I realized I wanted to build systems that were not just impactful, but also permissionless and global,” he says. “That’s when I discovered blockchain. The idea of writing code that could run trustlessly across the world, with no gatekeepers, completely captivated me.”

To this end, Sharif co-founded a fintech startup that leveraged blockchain technology to help businesses raise capital more efficiently. Instead of going through the slow, expensive process of issuing bonds through intermediaries like banks, the startup let companies create digital certificates of debt (like IOUs) that could be bought, sold, and tracked automatically using blockchain technology — which is essentially a tamper-proof digital ledger that doesn’t require a bank to maintain it. This made these bonds cheaper to issue, easier to buy and sell, and automatically handled payments without expensive intermediaries.

Sharif later joined a new company as a founding engineer, where he designed and built the core smart contracts — self-executing programs that automatically enforce rules on the blockchain — for a decentralized stablecoin protocol on the Ethereum blockchain that eventually managed over $40 million in capital. Later, he performed a similar role at another startup, where he wrote smart contracts that managed $250 million of company assets.

“These experiences taught me a lot about building in crypto: security, incentives, UX, and showed me the real impact of composable, open infrastructure,” says Sharif.

But throughout his work, he also began to notice a certain irony of software development, as the systems he and others built were running on open-source code that generated fortunes for organizations — while leaving most contributors unpaid.

How Sharif Is Building Open-Source Development’s Missing Financial Stack with Merit

Sharif discovered Merit while scrolling through social media, and the project instantly resonated with a belief he’s held for years: a developer’s value should be measured by the code they ship.

Merit adds an ownership layer that automatically tracks attribution (who wrote what code) and creates a detailed record of each developer’s commits. That way, when someone funds a project — whether it’s an individual user, a foundation, or a company that depends on the software — that money automatically flows to the developers who built it, proportional to their contributions.

Sharif’s role with Merit is to build the smart contracts that manage this attribution data, process incoming funding, and distribute payments to contributors. “In the end, I’ll have built the Merit account,” he explains, “which is basically like a bank balance you have inside your terminal.” This account is directly integrated into the developer workflow, allowing contributors to see their ownership stakes and compensation without ever leaving their coding environment.

The technical challenge is in making this system both secure and seamless. Merit’s smart contracts need to handle ownership distributions, maintain accuracy across thousands of contributions, and ensure funds are properly allocated — all without requiring developers to learn new tools or platforms. “It’s about building infrastructure that feels invisible,” Sharif notes, “but fundamentally changes how value flows in open source.”

His ambition for Merit is more than just paying open source developers — he hopes to fundamentally redesign how software development is incentivized. Right now, compensation is predominantly tied to employment, so unless you’re brought on full-time, your essential contributions won’t earn you much. But Merit breaks this model with a cap table-based rewards system, allowing developers to contribute on their own terms. Someone who makes one major contribution every few months can earn just as much as a full-time employee — what matters is impact, not hours logged.

This approach promises to create new opportunities for independent developers, creators, and what Sharif calls “10x contributors” — highly skilled builders who want freedom over how and when they work. He envisions a system where the best developers (and the best-paid ones) aren’t necessarily employees; they're contributors whose value is visible, measurable, and paid for.

Removing Gatekeepers and Getting Open-Source Devs Paid

The infrastructure that Sharif is building with Merit aims to address the disconnect between the value that open-source code creates and what its developers get in return.

“I joined Merit to focus on creating on-chain systems that reward reputation, contribution, and trust in a scalable and permissionless way,” he says. “I believe Merit can redefine how we coordinate and build online, and I’m excited to contribute by designing smart contracts that are both secure and impactful.”

Outside of his role with Merit, Sharif actively works to coach the next generation of developers. He regularly mentors at global Ethereum hackathons, and he’s the author of the Ethereum Virtual Machine primer EVM from Scratch. He also runs a podcast called Push & Pop, where he gives other smart contract developers a platform to share their knowledge.

He values this educational work just as much as his career, seeing it as crucial to breaking down the barriers enforced by traditional, rigid structures. Whether he’s mentoring aspiring developers or building Merit’s payment layer, it’s all in service of the same goal: empowering people to connect and exchange value without gatekeepers.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.