Detailed explanation of Bounty0x (BNTY) - lots of room for growth!
Intro
In the ‘Old West’, the government used to post bounties for the capture of dangerous criminals. Nowadays, bounties are offered by companies for performing highly specific tasks, such as finding vulnerabilities in code. Bounties are often used in online marketing, consulting, research, journalism and software development. Bounties thus allow companies to enlist the help of freelancers to accomplish specific projects.
However, this process if often difficult, discouraging both companies and freelancers. Freelancers have to spend a lot of time marketing their services on forums, and companies have to find freelancers that can accomplish their highly specific task. Furthermore, due to the power imbalance between large companies and individual freelancers, contracts may not always be honored on the completion of a bounty.
Bounty0x solves these problems by being a one stop shop for bounties. Companies can offer rewards for completing tasks, and bounty hunters can complete the tasks to receive these rewards. Bounty0x uses smart contracts to streamline and simplify the process and to prevent fraud from either party.
What problem is Bounty0x solving?
Bounty0x is solving major problems for both companies (potential bounty hosts) and freelancers (potential bounty hunters).
For bounty hosts – Bounty hosts do not have access to one particular platform for managing their bounty campaign. They have to post in forums and engage with freelancers over email. Moreover, they have to manage the entire bounty campaign themselves. Such campaigns are often comprised of many individual tasks (often hundreds or thousands of tasks). This requires the organization to maintain detailed excel spreadsheets with payment addresses, bounty descriptions, and bounty submissions. Doing all of this is inefficient and time consuming. It limits the scope of bounty campaigns and requires companies to hire dedicated bounty campaign managers.
For bounty hunters – Freelancers are really screwed by the current system. First, they have to spend valuable (unpaid) time searching for tasks on forums or via email. This is a highly inefficient process.
Second, once they accept and complete a bounty, they’re often taken advantage of. Companies have an incentive to say that freelancers didn’t adequately complete the tasks, so often freelancers don’t get the full compensation they were promised. Given the power imbalance between companies and freelancers, freelancers also often do not have the legal or financial capacity to fight back against this. This strongly discourages freelancers from pursuing bounties full time.
Together, these shortcomings of the current bounty market prevent it from really growing and taking off. Bounty0x uses blockchain technology to solve these problems.
How does Bounty0x solve these problems?
For starters, Bounty0x provides a single platform that bounty hosts and bounty hunters can all use. This cuts down on the difficulty for both companies and freelancers to connect with each other.
But most important is how submissions are verified and payments are made. This is where Bounty0x’s revolutionary use of blockchain technology and its BNTY token come in. Bounty hosts can submit bounties that bounty hunters complete. Upon completion, these bounties can be reviewed by “bounty sheriffs.” The sheriffs are third party reviewers who purchase BNTY tokens on the open market. They then stake their BNTY tokens when they review a submission. In order to determine whether a bounty task has been reviewed and verified correctly by a reviewer, there will be a process through which multiple reviewers review the same bounty. The outcome which is deemed correct will be that which has the most responses. If a Bounty Sheriff performs an incorrect review, a portion of his staked BNTY will be burned. This incentivizes the third-party reviewer (the bounty sheriff) to honestly and impartially evaluate the submission.
Furthermore, the bounties will be tied to smart contracts (which are already revolutionizing contracts), so freelancers don’t have to worry about protracted disputes with companies. Once their submissions are verified by sheriffs, they will be guaranteed their reward.
What’s the future like for Bounty0x?
Bounty0x is a brand new company but they already have a working product and are expanding rapidly. The marketplace for bounties is still relatively niche, but it is a rapidly growing field. Once there is a large platform and an effective review and payment system (which is exactly what Bounty0x provides), the field will likely only grow.
The sky is the limit for this kind of system. After all, bounties need not be offered only for niche tech jobs. They can be offered for any freelancing gig, and the freelance economy is growing rapidly every year. In the words of a recent Forbes article touting Bounty0x:
Where this all leads remains to be seen. If big companies like Google and Facebook start turning to platforms like this, it's very possible that freelance bounty-hunting could go mainstream. But one thing is certain: The freelance community is always on the cutting edge of the world of work—and startups like this offer interesting hints on where people will be making a living in the future.
Most impressively, despite being only a few months old, Bounty0x already has a working product, over $1 million worth of posted bounties, and partnerships with major bounty hosts including Ethfinex, Giftcoin, and Safe Haven (all of these are cryptos using bounties to encourage freelancers to check their code for vulnerabilities and so on).
Bounty0x is brand new and is currently in its alpha mode. Beta mode launches in Q1 2018 (this February) and its staking mechanism (all the sheriff stuff I mentioned) goes live in Q2 2018. Its current market cap is below $30 million and rapidly growing.
Other
The core team is comprised of Pascal Thellman, who has a copywriting background and previously founded a German ecommerce website, Angelo Adam, an attorney and District0x Community Manager, and Deniz Dalkilic, a software engineer who previously worked at Thomson Reuters. You can see their website and whitepaper for additional team members.
You can purchase Bounty0x on kucoin. (See here about how to purchase)
Sources
https://hackernoon.com/another-great-project-you-should-keep-an-eye-on-is-bounty0x-2c34389da119
https://bounty0x.io/whitepaper.pdf
TL;DR: Bounty0x allows companies to hire freelancers to accomplish specific tasks. These tasks are reviewed by third parties who can stake BNTY coins on their reviews of the tasks. This ensures impartiality in reviews of submissions. Smart contracts then ensure swift payment to freelancers who completed their bounties. Bounty0x launched in June 2017 and has a market cap below $30 million. They have lots of room for growth!
Good article, i'm personally also using bounty0x.
You can find more information here: https://steemit.com/earnmoney/@niel96/earn-cryptocurrency-from-home-by-doing-tasks-on-bounty0x