ICO bounty programs are a great way to participate in the market and earn tokens. These tokens can even be exchanged for fiat money. Most of the activities aren’t really technical in nature as they rely on common internet activities and interactions. Participants can simply look up reliable and famous bounty programs on the internet. There are sites that will list a dedicated list of ICO bounty programs. One of the best ways to get involved in bounty programs is via Bitcointalk and Cryptocointalk forums. Almost all ICO bounties are listed here.
Users can simply check the eligibility criteria and the activities listed to be executed under the program. They can enrol themselves in a pre-ICO or a post-ICO bounty program with added ease & earn rewards with every share, every like or every article they like. Users who are participating in a bounty program are usually called “bounty hunters”. As a bounty hunter, participants are telling others about projects that are undergoing a certain bounty program.
Signing-up for an ICO bounty program is easy. As soon as users associate with a program, they start receiving links that can be easily posted to their social media accounts. Further success depends on the number of likes, shares and other social reactions. Also, it depends on participant’s writing or debugging skills, i.e. how well they might execute the task assigned. ICO’s usually explain in great detail specific rules for their bounty programs.
6. Future of bountiesWe can say that as the popularity of ICO is increasing, there is a significant increase in the popularity of bounty programs. According to the website Bounty lord, from September 2017 to date (May 15th 2018), there have been 469 active bounties and 737 closed ones.
https://i.imgur.com/hGXEMGM.pngOut of all active bounties, 24 are active since January, 127 since February, 126 since March, 93 since April and 80 since May 2018. These numbers coincide with the increasing number of ICO’s that have emerged since the beginning of 2018.
https://i.imgur.com/hGXEMGM.pngThese numbers clearly show that this trend is not going away, and that we can expect many more ICO’s and a lot more exciting bounty programs to show up in the second half of 2018.
Although the number of ongoing bounties is not going to diminish anytime soon, there is a lot of criticism of bounty programs, mostly for the following reasons:
Bounties create an artificial sense of community through Telegram numbers, social media followers, posts, youtube videos, etc.
They give incentives to “free” token receivers to sell when the token is available at the market
There is no way to tell whether hype surrounding an ICO is an active, market-ready community or a well-incentivized group of bounty hunters
Bounty incents this group of bounty hunters to pump any news, increasing crypto volatility
There is no differentiation between someone who is genuinely promoting a project and someone who is posting for a reward
What might be the solution to these problems — Full disclosure.
- ICO projects should require their bounty hunters to somehow identify themselves when they are posting or doing an action for bountie
- Bounty hunters should voluntarily disclose when they are posting or doing an action for bounty
- Bounty programs should be disclosed during the token sale, so that anyone interested can clearly see what kinds of bounties are being levied and for what
