A New Foundation: The Bounties Network Explorer is Live

A few highlights of our new explorer and how we’re making it even easier for users to build peer-to-peer marketplaces

At the Bounties Network, we are creating the building blocks of the new peer-to-peer economies. We craft the means to empower people around the world to access a global pool of work and talent.

The release of our new explorer is the key to a stronger and more powerful foundation, designed to ensure we build robust, inclusive and diverse marketplaces. It’s been an exciting and challenging journey for us to rebuild our product from scratch based on user feedback and we cannot wait for you to…explore it!

The Bounties world will now be on explorer.bounties.network but don’t worry, the old beta.bounties.network will redirect. We’re also introducing a new look for our website to celebrate the new look, feel and vibe of the Bounties Network hive. Check it out!

Our community has been one of the main drivers in shaping the new explorer and their feedback, consistent involvement and creative perspectives have helped us immensely. By shipping early and having our v1.0 explorer on Mainnet since October 2017 has meant that a lot of people played around with bountying any task they could dream of, at times struggled with it, but ultimately, got the experience of a working with a live dApp and helped us create a better one.

Our thanks also goes out to the Ethereum projects that have created bounties across translation, design, research and social impact — you’ve been instrumental in validating our assumptions, helping us discover bugs and understanding the needs of both bounty creators and fulfillers. Blockchain work is definitely community work!

With the launch of the new explorer, feedback continues to be important. We have launched a bounty specifically for this so please do let us know how you’re finding the experience: Do you love it? Is it working as you’d hoped? What could be improved? What are you hoping for next? We want your input — fulfill the feedback bounty or join us in Slack if you like having conversations with real people instead of forms.

What’s New and Improved:

• Profile page & account information: you can now create a full profile on the Bounties Network including photo, links to social and personal websites, current work, languages spoken and skills. The profile will also include how often your submissions get accepted and the ratings you receive while both creating and fulfilling bounties.

• New leaderboard: We’ve split the leaderboard into Top Earners and Top Issuers. The standard board covers the top 25 entries in each category and you can easily switch between them by toggling.

• Comments: Yes! Comments are now a fully functioning piece of the Bounties Network experience. They are chronological and serve as a quick way to ask for clarifications, extra information or simply say hello.

• Notifications: Probably one of the best new features — notifications each time you receive a comment or a submission. This should speed up reviewing and accepting bounties. You will still get an email notification but in time, we hope you’ll manage it all straight from the platform.

• Fully responsive and optimized for mobile dApp browsers: Being able to issue and fulfill bounties on mobile has been on the wishlist ever since we launched Beta!

Thoughts from the team

From a design perspective, our new white-label bounties explorer serves as a clean-slate. While our old explorer served to test the waters and our assumptions about how our creative community might leverage such a tool, the new explorer takes what we’ve learned and aims to deliver a more refined beta experience.

The project’s effort has resulted in a more valuable and versatile tool that is easier to use, and does a better job of managing our users’ expectations around how the product operates in the context of the blockchain. We think it offers us a much more solid foundation to build upon as we continue to learn and iterate.

Corwin Harrell — Lead Designer

We’ve been putting our all into building this new explorer. I believe we’re setting new standards — UX and engineering — for how a dApp should walk a user through all the confusing steps of wallets, transactions, etc., and how a proper infrastructure can make a dApp run as smoothly as a regular app.

Our syncing and event systems that listen to all the Ethereum contracts in realtime is also pretty cool and robust. If you’re into backend dvelopment, you’d definitely appreciate it. Also, this was a lot of fun!

Will Villanueva — CTO

With the new explorer we are essentially evolving the events’ flow through the entire system. The recent additions of notifications and flow guidelines, we have much more flexibility and power. Visibility and overview is key to a good experience when using a marketplace. With the new dashboard it is much easier to see what is going on, catch up on notifications, and see what’s going on with your bounties.

The new settings let you configure exactly what kind of emails you’d like to see, so you can be notified when important things happen — like a new submission to your bounty, or when someone accepts your submission. These emails now include much more detail, making it easy to see what is happening right from your inbox.

Matias Forbord — Full Stack Developer

The dApp ecosystem as it stands today is more or less built for developers by developers. There are some excellent dApps that buck this trend, but I feel like it is the general theme. With the new bounties explorer we wanted to build a platform that was accessible to all users — especially those new to web3.

I believe that the patterns we built while developing this product are going to become influential in the developer community and will help dApp developers pull away from the by developer for developers theme.

Matt Garnett — Full Stack Developer

The new explorer is exciting for me because it was designed from the ground up based on the feedback of our users, by understanding some of the pain points our community members experienced and working with them to make issuing or fulfilling a bounty as easy as possible!

Mark Beylin — CEO

Launching the new Bounties Network explorer is a huge step and it signifies our team’s ongoing commitment to always ensuring the best possible experience for our users.

Blair Ball — BD & Strategy

For anyone learning about blockchain or those new to web3, an easily accessible platform is key to adoption. A smooth on-boarding flow, managing user expectations at every step, enabling profiles and activating user ratings will lower the entry barriers. Blockchain work is community work and the new explorer will allow us to reach more and more audiences across the world.

Simona Pop — Community & Marketing

Here’s how you can get in touch and get involved with Bounties:

• Join our Bounties Slack community
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like our Facebook page
• Stay tuned for updates

If you’d like to share the news with your friends in the community, we’d be forever grateful. We’re really excited about the launch and hope it will broaden the use of bounties way beyond technical applications.