Are bounties a good use-case for blockchains?
We set out to explore in Product Hunt’s #MakerFestival this thanksgiving.
Why bounties?
Developing solutions for the future-of-work, the topic of bounties often comes up. There is something that has always bothered me about bounties, that is the countless hours spent attempting hacks or auditing code that is never measured or rewarded. Bounties are by definition a case of “winner takes all”.
Why blockchain?
The key benefits blockchains offer in the use-case of bounties and associated auditing are immutability and “good actor” behaviour incentives through tokenomics.
We set about putting bounties on the eosio blockchain and CrowdOS was born.
What is CrowdOS?
CrowdOS is the world’s first decentralized bounty management platform that self-verifies hacks.
The platform is a self-service DApp that benefits both companies and the developer community. While companies create and manage bounties, hackers review code and get rewarded for their time, even if no bugs are found. As a result, an embeddable widget is generated empowering companies to promote trust on their own site or code repository.
What problems does CrowdOS solve?
The term “bounties” comes from the days of the Wild West and to date that is how they have operated. They are messy to setup, plagued by informal processes and no guarantee they will be paid out. The extreme implications are companies held to their knees with threats and blackmail.
Cybersecurity is an aspect in today’s world that no organization can afford to ignore. Yet research shows data breaches involving sensitive customer or business information have doubled in the past two years costing companies between $40 million and $350 million as a result of lost business, negative impact on reputation and employee time. With figures showing 83% of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud and new data privacy rules imposing penalties of up to 4% of corporate global revenues, companies must stand up and take data privacy and security seriously.
CrowdOS is a new model for bounties which solves these problems. First, the traditional bounty “winner takes all” approach is replaced with winnings not only for the hacker that finds a vulnerability but also incentives for those that contribute their time in failed attempts. Second, CrowdOS recognises the value of those failed attempts in terms of social proof and validation to viewers. Third, the final outcome of whether a hack is a real threat or not can be ultimately autonomous, whereby a submitted hack can be voted on by members to reach a consensus decision.
We believe our decentralized model for bounties, crowdsourcing bounty hunters, improved bounty rewards and visibility with a large and active community will effectively solve these issues.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
If you are a hacker or a company interested in a better future-of-work for bounties, hit Subscribe on our upcoming product page.
We are team #tokentree one of the finalist teams in the EOS global hackathon to be held in December 2018. Granted permission from Block.one EOS VC to pivot since the Sydney event, we are exploring alternative use-cases for our crowdsourcing, gamification and consensus ruling platform. This post is part of our Product Hunt Marker Festival submission. We have used the time pressure of the PH Makers festival to rapidly develop the new product.
