Relive the Wild West with Bounty0x, an Ethereum-Powered Bounty and Reward System

There’s a new sheriff in town, and that sheriff is Bounty0x. It’s an exciting new program that allows individuals or companies to post all sorts of bounties online in exchange for a token reward.

The bounty could be almost anything, from finding software bugs to completing marketing tasks or submitting creative works. You can think of a bounty as a crowdsourced job with a single task.

This program runs on the district0X system which is based on Ethereum. Read on as we go through the basics of this innovative, problem solving platform.

The wild west of cryptocurrencies

Ever since the early days of the internet, many have made the comparison of the online world and of the wild west. The wild west refers to a period of time in the United States where the western half of the country was still undeveloped and untamed.

In those days, the government would post bounties in exchange for catching or killing criminals. In this sense, they outsourced their law-enforcement duties.

While bounties of this kind don’t generally exist anymore, the Bounty0x platform makes use of the wild west analogy in a clever and artistically creative way.

On the site, participants are divided up into three types. That being bounty hosts, bounty hunters, and bounty sheriffs. Hosts are the people or organizations that offer the bounties and reward for completing it.

Bounty hunters are those that attempt to complete the given bounty. Bounty sheriffs are essentially verifiers that double check provided work in exchange for part of the reward.

In order to reduce fraud, poor submissions, or incorrect validations, users of the platform need to put up a small or large token stake as a way of saying 'I stand behind my work'.

If a participant is found to have acted fraudulently or in bad faith, then they risk losing all or part of their stake. Tokens lost in this way are burned (permanently destroyed).

Boundless bounty options

According to the white paper and the official website, a bounty can be almost anything. For example, it can be used for online marketing and influencer marketing. Such as someone with enough Twitter followers retweeting or posting a message.

Another is software development, such as bugs or producing useful tools or plug-ins and so on. Bug bounties have been around for quite some time, but the Bounty0x program allows these sorts of bounties to be easily discoverable and traceable, and also can help bug finders develop a positive reputation which will give them access to larger tasks with a bigger payout.

Another listed bounty could be consulting services. This could come in the form of bounty hunters sending in improvement suggestions and solutions to “highly specialized business situations”.

On a much larger scale governments, corporations, and other groups can post research bounties on subjects such as finding a cure for a disease or accomplishing another perhaps large and multi-year task.

With this kind of bounty, perhaps world-changing influences can come out of them. The bounty rewards for such a project would certainly be large as well.

The BNTY token

A total of 500 million BNTY tokens have been minted. The tokens will be used to pay winning bounties, and for network participants to offer them as a stake.

There are a number of situations that can cause tokens to be burned. For example, if a task fails verification, the submitter could face a burn of some of their tokens.

Why burn tokens?

This will reduce the overall supply and thus generate a deflationary economic model. These models are ideal for long-term investors and make the token a better store value over time. As well since the tokens are required just to participate, this will increase the demand and consequently could increase their value.

Since it’s estimated launch price of about $0.01 each, tokens are currently trading at around $0.15 on the open market and they’re currently 114 million units in circulating supply. In total, bounty tokens have a market cap of just under $18 million at the present time. The tokens highest selling point has been around $0.30. Tokens have been on the market since late December of 2017.

Connection with district0x

The Bounty0x platform comes from and is directly tied to another Ethereum project called district0x. This project is aimed at creating social networks and other kinds of platforms using its own token. Bounty0x is one of the largest and most successful offspring of the district0x program.

district0X tokens are currently trading at $0.11 each, with a total market cap of almost $70 million. The tokens are also supported by the Exodus wallet.

Final thoughts

Reviewing the data of the Bounty0x ICO, the platform was able to meet its entire hard cap goal of $15 million. Even though the site is only in Alpha state right now, it already has multiple millions of dollars worth of bounties posted to it.

This suggests that this program could have a bright future and see more and more use. Whether or not it’s a good investment is still debatable as the currency has only been on the market for a few days.

However, seeing a sharp growth from $0.01 to $0.15 does suggest that additional growth is possible.