Bounties are incentives or rewards offered by organizations or individuals to encourage the completion of specific tasks, projects, or objectives. These incentives can take various forms, such as monetary compensation, recognition, or other benefits. Bounties are typically offered for tasks that require specialized skills, expertise, or resources, and they serve to motivate individuals or teams to contribute their efforts towards achieving desired outcomes. By providing incentives aligned with organizational goals, bounties help drive productivity, innovation, and collaboration, ultimately leading to the successful completion of projects and objectives.
The Relationship Between Freelancing and Bounties In the Web2 realms, freelancers work on delegated tasks, either one-time or on a rolling basis. Bringing this concept into the Web3 ecosystem, let’s refer to these tasks with rewards as bounties. A helpful to use is that while startups source talent, by way of job boards, interviews, and a robust hiring pipeline, DAOs crowdsource talent from their community. People self-organize into niches based on what excites them and collectively begin to explore those ideas collectively. It is the DAO’s responsibility to enable new entrants to contribute and execute their ideas. But this raises a question: Without any top-down delegation, how does anything get done? The toolkit for decentralized coordination is varied. One powerful tool is the Bounty Board - a centralized repository of discrete tasks with an associated price tag. Bounties are typically issued when the bounty creator does not have the time or skill to execute the requested task. In a traditional organization, these tasks are delegated by a manager to their constituents; but when talent is crowdsourced, the task can be picked up by anyone based on their availability, interest, skillset, and compensation. I took to Twitter and asked my mutuals what difference exists between bounties and quests. For the sake of this piece, I'd be sharing some of their definitions of bounties. " Bounty is a reward for successfully executing a mission". - "But for bounty: it’s purely a reward-based activity. It could be a bounty for someone (to kill something or someone, haha) or a bug (more for the hackers). This one requires one’s skills, either digitally or physically. Sha know bounty, it can either be to find it dead 💀 or alive" - "Bounty has to deal with humans…find something valuable of some sort" - " Bounty is something you find" - "Bounty is a hunt with a reward" - All the above explanations define bounty in good ways. But, I'd summarise these definitions by saying bounty is a reward for an activity you complete. In the Web3 world, the tasks are often skill-based and help an organisation or Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) reach its goals. Because people contribute to the end goal of these DAOs, they get paid. They get paid in tokens, which could be the project's native token or another token/coin. Most times, bounty boards require you to connect your decentralized wallet (Trust wallet, Metamask, Phantom, etc.). defines a bounty as " a sum paid by a government or business entity to reward certain activities or behaviour for reaching an economic goal or solving a problem." From this definition, we can say bounty works when someone completes a task and gets paid. Now let me explain the process of completing bounties. The first thing to do is to hop on a bounty platform. This is the easiest way for organisations and users to connect. Organisations can drop their bounties here, while users discover bounties on this platform. After that, you create an account. Depending on the platform, you may connect your crypto wallet and still connect other profiles, like your email address, Discord, or even Twitter. Then, your search for bounties based on your skill set. Often, these platforms list bounties based on skills, so it becomes easy for users to find what they can do. Read the instructions attached to the tasks. Complete the task. Submit it, and wait for payment. The payment will be sent to your linked wallet address. Sometimes, contributors will have to express interest in the tasks, and the project owner picks their preferred contributor. Other times, the contributor has to be a member of the organisation with the task, and the task has to be delegated to them before they can attempt it. You may ask yourself, why should I complete a bounty? You should attempt a bounty for many reasons, and we will reveal some of them in the following paragraphs. Completing bounties is an excellent way to build your on-chain resume. With your profile, projects can easily see that you've interacted with blockchain technology in the past. These bounties allow you to interact with protocols and not just know terminologies but also understand them. Aside from that, you get to build human relationships. You meet project leads, network, and establish connections that may help you find a job in the near future. You get to show future employers that you bark and bite; you don't just brag about knowing terms but also have experience. An employer will easily trust you if they see that you've done actual work in the ecosystem. C.) Earn Tokens & Get Paid You can earn fungible and non-fungible tokens with bounties. Some bounties give you NFT badges, and others provide you with crypto tokens that are worth something. The Future of Bounty Boards The Bounty Board is in its early stages of evolution. However, understanding the insane level of development happening in the cryptosphere, it isn’t too difficult to consider what bounty boards may become. From soliciting work and connecting creators and builders, to deeper and richer relationships between DAOs and protocols, bounty boards may one day become the de facto form of labor organization. Our future plans include ways to automate payment smart contract escrows for any ERC20 token, allowing external organizations to create bounties for BanklessDAO members, multi-user claiming, dispute resolution, and . As bounty boards become more blockchain native, it may not be too long before we see freelancers making a living on-chain via bounty hunting, and employment offers being made and picked up via a worker’s wallet history. We’ve talked about the and before; this is the next step in its realization. The more you transact and the more tokens you earn, the more earning opportunities you unlock. Are bounties only restricted to the web3 world? No, they are not. In fact, bounties already existed in other industries before web3 came. An example of such bounties may be the SEC bounty. Do all bounties reward contributors? Bounties are not bounties without rewards. However, it is essential to note that sometimes someone else completed the bounty before you or did a better job, so they get the reward. In this case, you won't earn the tokens again, but you will gain on-chain experience. Are web3 bounties only for developers? That's not true. Although developer/bug/feature bounties are more common, there are many other kinds. There can be bounties for content writing, graphic designs, interacting with testnets, and more. This is more reason we included bounty boards that do not just provide bug bounties. Where To Find Bounties (Bounty Boards)? The most common place to find a bounty is a bounty board. These boards are similar to freelance marketplaces that connect clients and freelancers. They connect DAOs or project managers with contributors (people that work on a bounty). They can also be referred to as Web3 project management platforms. Let's look at some common Web3 bounty boards. Are bounty boards the only place to find bounties? No. You can also find bounties from the protocol's website, its discord channel, and social media. Bounty Boards as a Service Going into this project, BanklessDAO knew that other crypto-organizations would benefit from a Discord and Web3 integrated bounty board. Having only released a primitive version, we’re very much in the product discovery phase. If your organization may benefit from having a Bounty Board of its own, we invite you to fill out the below. The entire Bounty Board project can be replicated and branded to your specification!Let’s #gobankless! 
Bounties
