The Next Chapter for Bounties
As of this week, we will be stopping all development work on the Bounties Explorer and Protocol
When we first started work on the problem of outsourced market transactions and minimum-viable-incentives in 2017, we did so with a number of hypotheses.
We were initially excited about the prospect of marketplace interoperability: the idea that people could easily post bounties on one marketplace, which would also end up on competing sites as well, to the ultimate benefit of users everywhere. We were also very keen to explore the nature of building protocol based open platforms, which exposed functionality that could easily be composed and reused for as many use-cases as the mind could think of. Finally, we were eager to dive into the world of incentives, understanding the exciting ways a myriad of tokenized community models could be used to reshape human behaviour, and bring about deeper collaboration among strangers. Over the past two and a half years, we’ve done a great deal with a small team and a shoestring budget.
Marketplace Interoperability
The first of our assumptions we got the chance to test was that of cross-platform interoperability, thanks to our collaboration with Gitcoin. We were delighted to have found a team that shared our intentions around open source data (and not just codebases), and in early 2018 we began to experiment with what marketplace interoperability meant for us as businesses, and for our users.
As time went on, it became apparent that the thesis wasn’t as straightforward as we initially assumed: users didn’t seem to care that much for the sharing of bounties across our platforms, and more importantly, this interoperability was counter to both of our incentives as platforms (which needed to build network effects with high switching costs in order to generate sustainable revenue). From this work, came the conclusion that for interoperability to exist on top of open platforms like Ethereum, it would likely need to be Adversarial Interoperability. This meant that platforms would likely continuously fight to maintain their closed networks as long as those networks functioned as the moats that ensured the platforms’ continued profitability. Changing behaviours can take a long time.
Smart Contract Composability & Reusability
This assumption is one which is still being tested, and may still come to fruition. Originally, we had imagined a no-brainer use case for bounty composability, where DAOs could easily post bounties from within their own applications, and those bounties would automatically end up on a multitude of marketplaces thanks to the open nature of Ethereum smart contracts. We had also hoped that we might be able to collaborate with external marketplace teams on building open shared standards, or that other applications could be built atop the protocol we’d designed.
Over time, we learned a few things:
- Ethereum may have a reinventing-the-wheel problem. Ethereum developers feel particularly inclined to build everything themselves and avoid reusing pre-existing work.
- Composability requires cross-team collaboration, and strong lines of communication, both of which are difficult to achieve when teams are globally distributed, and are each working under different assumptions, towards different priorities.
While we’re happy to have explored collaboration opportunities with many DAO-related organizations (including Aragon and DAOStack), we believe the difficulties we’ve encountered are only a glimpse at some of the people-related challenges that currently exist around Ethereum’s thesis of composable applications at this time. DAOStack is launching their integration with StandardBounties at ETHDenver so there is definitely still scope for success.
Hard Stats
One of the defining aspects of Bounties Network is how much we managed to achieve with a very small team and a low budget. We have always operated as a lean startup, working with limited expenditures and spending as much time as possible trying to define the best use cases for the technology and its world changing mechanisms. In the end, this approach did not align with the needs of our investors. Nonetheless, we believe this experimentation and validation is necessary and that it takes time. Finding an environment where it is possible to sustain this type of work without consistent revenue continues to be difficult in our space.
As a team of four throughout 2019, we managed to ship StandardBounties 2.0, Meta-Transactions and a whole host of exciting community programmes.
Some of our Key Metrics:
- 12,000+ user signups with web3 wallets
- 885+ bounties live bounties on explorer.bounties.network
- 3,000+ bounties from Gitcoin using the StandardBounties protocol
- 8,000+ total fulfillments across all Bounties Network community platforms
- 3,900+ activity comments on bounties and fulfillments
- 70,000+ monthly views during December alone
Real World Use Cases
Communities
One of the main things we realized while exploring the use of bounties across verticals is that anyone can participate in and be a part of the communities we are creating. By creating different bespoke networks around distinct events and organizations for almost two years, we have gained a deep understanding of how incentives and engagements stimulate individual action for communal benefit.
The idea of creating bespoke bounty networks, some with their very own tokens, came from the desire to provide a market-space for the individuals coming together for a particular event to interact and transact with each other. By facilitating these actions, we enabled the environment for behaviours and relationships at the very core of what can be defined as community DNA.
Notable examples of these real world use cases are plentiful:
- UNICEF Boost token & the Surge Network
- BRLN Coin & the Berlin Network
- Moksha Coin & Network
- ConsenSys Internal network
We are at a tipping point in the evolution of communities and we believe the work we’ve done with Bounties is incredibly rich. The precedents we have created prove that we have the technologies to create spaces and tools for a variety of communities to develop and thrive through. The work we’ve been doing so far has already given us key insights into the makeup of crypto community DNA, patterns of behaviour and relationship dynamics. The work has only just begun and we hope bounties will continue to be a key part of communities to come.
Education
Perhaps one of the most effective and successful use cases for bounties has been our “earn as you learn” model. Given that a practice-by-doing learning method results in 75% retention, bounty based education has been a key driver in web3 user onboarding for us.
We used the model across the ETHGlobal circuit throughout 2019 to educate and onboard all new and beginner hackers attending for an enhanced event experience. By onboarding and enabling users to earn, rather than buy crypto, we ensured a much smoother and engaging experience. 2019’s earn as you learn efforts culminated with the work we did with the EF Devcon ETHScholars Programme.
We also included education bounties in the Brazil Favelas Educational Programme we had the privilege to get involved with — a partnership between MakerDAO, the World Bank, CVM (Brazil’s SEC) and Blockchain Academy Brazil. The purpose of the initiative was to educate youth from Brazil’s favelas in a “Develop your Future” course. By introducing bounties into the learning process, student retention grew exponentially compared to a previous cohort.
Whether you work with existing tokens that have an explicit monetary value or community specific tokens designed to signal reputation and enable access to specific perks, the value of incentives in the educational process is very high indeed.
User Centric Design
Throughout our time working on the bounties platform, we have always placed emphasis on collecting feedback from users to inform our design decisions early and often. Whether it has been learning through our partnerships or our bespoke network pilot projects, we have always been keen on creating the means for our community to voice their feedback about their experiences, both for our benefit and theirs. With a platform like Bounties Network which has been intentionally designed from the get-go to accommodate a broad spectrum of use cases, we have even been able to leverage our own platform as a means to…
…recruit & test with our users:
…engage in important discussion with our community:
…and to incentivize and reward our community participants for doing so. Not only has this provided us with a wealth of actionable insight from the people that have engaged with the product, but it has also enabled us to spark and strengthen relationships with the people that have used the platform and who have supported us on our journey. Winning the Devcon IV UX Awards in 2018 with our new explorer was a key indicator that the work we had been doing was incredibly valuable. We hope this serves as an example of how important user centric building can be for web3.
Looking Ahead
Moving forward, the protocol and the Bounties explorer as well as the existing communities will stay as they are. Organizations will still be able create bounties on any tasks they desire at their own leisure, and continue giving everyone an opportunity to explore a live Ethereum dapp and earn crypto. We will also continue supporting teams wanting to make use of the platform or protocol (on a more casual basis), and remain open to contributions to any of our codebases if users have new functionality they wish to add.
Overall, we feel very excited about what’s next, for both the team and for the space in general. We feel confident that Gitcoin will continue to steward the bounties use-case in a way that improves collaboration in the Ethereum community, as well as explore new ways of incentivizing people like their CLR Grants program.
A list of “thank-you’s” would be too long to include in a blog post like this one, so for now we’ll say this — to the many individuals, teams and incredible users who over the past two years have given us advice, guided our intuitions, and supported our work, we want to extend our deep gratitude for your help and we hope you continue using bounties as part of your blockchain experience.
