What the Hell are Bounties?

This essay is 6 of 7 essays for The Tech Progressive Writing Challenge. Join the build_ Discord to join the conversation.

A bounty is a reward offered for completing tasks. I initially thought bounties were reserved for highly technical development work, but that's not the case!

Examples of Web3 bounties:

• Write content on social token-related topics

• Edit essays for a DAO writer's guild

• Conduct data analysis on the social tokens market or community

• Write DAO meeting summaries

• Create an infographic

• MC a Q&A session

• Development work including bug fixes and identifying vulnerabilities

• Much more

Bounties are placed on a wide range of tasks including community development, data analytics, public relations, promotion, art, development, leadership and more.

For development bounties, tasks may be rated by the following severity:

Higher Severity —> Higher Bounty

Web3 communities typically reward contributors via bounties in their native governance token. Bounties can either be recurring or one-off for projects, according to at Richard writing on Hackernoon.

At first this may not seem ideal. Some token? Come on....

But here's where it gets exciting.

As the value of the organization grows, your tokens appreciate in value. Sounds like a great incentive to me.

Jesse walden of Variant Fund writes this about the ownership economy:

"Rather than a platform’s inner circle of founders and investors taking home the value, users are able to earn the majority of value generated from their collective contributions."

Is this the future of work?

If you're like me and trying to wrap your head around what a social token is, see Linda Xie's piece on social tokens.

Linda Xie @ljxie

I wrote a beginner’s guide to social tokens post which covers what social tokens are, some examples, and why they are exciting! I expect many more creators and communities to issue social tokens in the future

linda.mirror.xyzA beginner’s guide to social tokens — MirrorSocial tokens are tokens issued by individual creators or communities that enable community members to collaborate and share ownership in the value created together. Social tokens can be earned as rewards for contributing to the group and can be used for purposes such as granting access to a chat gr…

A gradual bounty program can be a great way to onboard people who are new to the web3 space.

Eventually, some may become a professional bounty hunter like samczsun on the ethereum bounty leaderboard.

Chasing bounty can be a great way to take on tangible tasks, learn about the metaverse, and earn ownership in networks and organizations that you have a hand in building.

Thanks for exploring bounties and the creator economy with me!