The Origin of Tea: From the Nebraska Problem to Securing the Open Source Economy

The Nebraska Problem

There’s a famous XKCD comic about the “building blocks of the internet.” At the very bottom sits a tiny, fragile block labeled “a project maintained by one person in Nebraska since 2003.” And on top of it? The rest of the internet.

That cartoon is funny, but it’s also tragic—because it’s true. Our digital world, from AI models to financial apps, depends on open source projects maintained by a handful of people, often underfunded and unsupported.

This is the Nebraska problem. And it’s where the story of Tea begins.

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TL;DR

The internet runs on fragile open source dependencies, often maintained by underfunded individuals—the Nebraska problem. Max (creator of Homebrew) and I built Tea to solve it, starting with chai and teaRank to fund dependencies, and expanding to secure the full open source supply chain. With $8.8T in demand-side value at stake and AI accelerating the urgency, Tea is creating token economies that will be among the most valuable in software history. Mainnet is ready, registration is open, and the community pre-sale is coming soon.

How Max and I Met This Problem Head-On

I’ve been a believer in open source for 25 years, ever since I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and immersed myself in the early days of Linux, PGP, and the hacker ethos of freedom. Open source was always about independence and transparency—but also about trust. Knowing what code you run. Knowing who wrote it. Knowing it hasn’t been tampered with.

My co-founder, Max Howell, lived the Nebraska problem firsthand. Max created Homebrew, the package manager that powered Mac development for hundreds of millions of developers. Homebrew was everywhere, woven into the DNA of modern software.

And yet, Max couldn’t afford to focus on it. Donations were inconsistent, enterprises that relied on Homebrew offered little support, and the few contributions that came in were usually earmarked for corporate interests, not the direction the community itself wanted to go.

Billions of dollars in enterprise value sat on his shoulders, and the reward? A blanket from Google. An iPad from Square (now Block). A Patreon that peaked at $55 a month.

That is the Nebraska problem in real life.

When Max and I came together, it was clear: if open source is going to power the AI era, the Nebraska problem had to be solved.

From Dependencies to Securing the Supply Chain

Our starting point was dependencies. The bottom of the stack. The fragile blocks holding everything else up.

That’s why we built Chai and teaRank—to identify which dependencies matter most and to begin distributing rewards to the people maintaining them. Out of 16,000 packages registered during our testnets, only a few hundred scored high enough to matter. Signal over noise.

But as we built, we saw a bigger opportunity.

Dependencies are just the first step. What the world really needs is a secure, transparent supply chain for open source itself.

• Chai shows us what matters.
  
  
• teaRank measures value.
  
  
• tea secures and distributes rewards across the chain.
  
  
• And together, they create the foundation for an open source economy that can sustain itself.
  
  

An economy where maintainers don’t have to beg for donations. Where security isn’t an afterthought. Where transparency is the default, not the exception.

The AI Era Raises the Stakes

The urgency couldn’t be clearer.

AI is rewriting the rules of development. Anyone can code in English. Engineers can “vibe code” entire applications with context engineering. Code is being generated and deployed at speeds humans alone can’t audit.

And what are these AI-generated applications built on? Dependencies. Libraries. Open source. The same fragile blocks the XKCD comic warned about.

Without transparency and funding, we’ll see a flood of black-box AI applications riddled with vulnerabilities. We’ll see scams, like the fake wallet apps that have already stolen millions. I personally know people who lost their life savings to apps that looked real but weren’t. Most recently, a Bitcoin wallet called Sparrow appeared real but wasn’t, and someone lost several hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin. That’s just one story among many.

This is why open source has to change.

Commercial open source models must become the norm. Licenses must evolve. Funding and transparency must be demanded, especially for software touching value or identity.

And it has to happen now—before AI eats the world.

Why Tea Is Different

This isn’t just a vision. We’ve been building, and the numbers prove it:

• 16,000+ packages registered during testnets.
  
  
• Hundreds of top OSS projects ranked by teaRank, signaling real value.
  
  
• 610,000 GitHub accounts connected.
  
  
• Testnet success: Assam and Sepolia were some of the busiest Ethereum L2 testnets Alchemy has ever seen.
  
  
• Adoption: PKGX is already being integrated into AI workflows by organizations like Hugging Face.
  
  
• Global recognition: Governments, enterprises, and regulators are talking about open source security like never before, especially in the context of AI.
  
  

The world is waking up to the Nebraska problem. Tea is the solution.

Why We Care

For Max, the Nebraska problem wasn’t theoretical. It was his life. He built Homebrew, the most widely-used package manager of its time, and still had to take contract work to pay the bills.

For me, it’s about freedom and trust. I’ve been burned by scam software, I’ve seen wallets steal from users, and I’ve watched friends lose everything because code wasn’t transparent. I know what it means to not control the software you rely on.

And I’ve watched AI-assisted development accelerate from a curiosity to a tidal wave. I use it myself, and I see the incredible direction it’s heading. But I also know it makes securing open source more urgent than ever.

That’s why Tea exists: to make sure open source developers are rewarded, dependencies are secured, and the future of software is transparent.

Why It Matters for Investors

Investors ask: where is the value?

Here’s the answer: the demand-side value of open source is $8.8 trillion. That’s not a projection—it’s what’s already there. But today, almost none of that flows back to the supply side.

By securing dependencies, funding maintainers, and creating token economies around open source, we unlock one of the largest untapped markets in history. And in the AI era, when every app and every model relies on these building blocks, the upside only grows.

These token economies will be some of the most valuable software economies ever built. And tea is positioned to lead them.

Join the Next Chapter of Open Source

The Nebraska problem isn’t going away. But with Tea, we can finally fix it.

Our mainnet is ready. Developers should be preparing to register their packages at tea.xyz. Our community pre-sale is coming soon—this is your chance to be early, to own the utility that will power the open source economy for the AI era.

Follow us on Twitter. Watch your email. Join the movement.

Because the future of software must be open. And with Tea, it will be secured, transparent, and rewarded.

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• Timothy Lewis 

🔥 The Origin of Tea was solving the Nebraska problem. The future of Tea is securing the $8.8 trillion open source economy for the AI era. Don’t just watch—be part of it.

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