🐥 How to earn your first dollar creating crypto dashboards

(originally published 3/11/22) — Above is a “bounty” currently on Flipside crypto. Crypto companies use these bounties to solicit custom dashboards.

Here’s how it works. An organization posts a requisition for a dashboard and sets a bounty. In this case, the Terra Foundation is the entity behind the terra blockchain.

They want a dashboard that gives daily updates on their treasury growth. They will pay 150 UST to the top 5 dashboards they receive and 500 UST to the best one. FYI, UST is Terra’s stablecoin so 1 UST = 1 dollar.

Flipside and Dune both use a querying language called SQL to retrieve and display blockchain data. As far as coding languages go, it’s pretty intuitive. Imagine the blockchain data for different events and contracts are stored in a big excel workbook. Using SQL, you write queries telling your dashboard which sheets, columns, and formulas to use to display the data you want.

For example, here’s a query I wrote pulling the most recent 10 NFTs minted on the blockchain. 10 lines of code, simple right?

Using flipside you can string together queries into one webpage that displays and explains live blockchain data like this page.

The best part? You just need an Ethereum wallet to log in, create a dashboard, and get paid. That’s it. Anyone around the world can get a job in data analytics today using the blockchain.

Bounties aren’t a new thing in crypto or even in coding. “Bug bounties” are standing offers from tech companies to pay white-hat hackers for code exploits they discover. Because security in crypto is so important, these standing bounties can be well into 6 figures and sometimes are flat % of the crypto that was at risk.

But you have to know what to look for in order to successfully find bug bounties and it takes years of experience to regularly find vulnerabilities.

I like what flipside crypto is doing with micro-bounties because companies can essentially pay small scholarships for their community to learn data visualizaiton.

And remember, if you’re interested in a project you don’t need a bounty to make them a dashboard! I have seen many people on Twitter go make dashboards on Dune or Flipside for free and parlay that into paid work.