How To Payout Via Gitcoin

Or: How to Give Coins

Published in

Gitcoin

6 min readApr 29, 2019

Over the past months we’ve had a lot of questions from funders about how to use advanced features of our platform. In this series of post we’ll outline one of our most historically powerful (but sometimes confusing) features.

Starting the Process

There are two types of payout, basic and advanced (we’re very creative). As the name suggests, Basic Payout gives you more control over how you pay out bounty hunters working on your issue. To get started click on Payout Bounty button as seen in the screenshot below.

Note: This button will only be present if you are connected to the right MetaMask address (the one that you originally funded the bounty from) and if you are on the right network within MetaMask (mainnet).

You’ll notice that the issue below is a traditional bounty, meaning that one person should get paid out for their work. However, neither basic nor advanced payout actually care about what type of bounty (traditional, contest, cooperative) you have selected. For a basic bounty, you’ll only have the option to pay out one user anyway, and for advanced payout, regardless of bounty type, you can pay multiple users that you believe have done a good job contributing to an issue (by paying them a percentage of bounty funds).

Once you’ve clicked on Payout Bounty you’ll see the following page. You’ll notice there are two options here, basic and advanced. We’ll do a quick walkthrough of both below.

Basic Payout

Basic payout is pretty straight forward. You’ll be taken to a page that looks a bit (read: exactly) like this:

Basic payout shows you the GitHub Issue URL, and the bounty submission. For a basic payout, there must already be work submitted. As we’ll see below, this is not the case for advanced payout (Pro Tip: This means if you want to pay out an individual bounty hunter but they haven’t submitted work, you can use advanced payout).

On the basic bounty page you’ll also have the option to rate the contributor you worked with, add a tip if they did a great job, and give them a Kudos for something you thought was particularly cool about working with them (or just something fun for them to show on their profile).

Once you’ve selected the GitHub user name that you want to pay out, you can rate each contributor from 1–5 stars (a modal will pop up if you want to rate them on more granular performance metrics) and proceed to setting your gas fees.

Gas is what Ethereum uses to manage the finite computing resources available on the network, and the more you pay the higher the priority (and hence the higher the speed) of your transaction.

Usually you’ll want to select Fast in the section shown below or, if you have a sense of the current network congestion, set your own gas price by clicking on the small downward facing arrow on the right. Selecting average or slow will frankly make your transaction take way longer than you probably want at the cost of just a few cents (although be sure to do a sanity check on the difference in price as network costs vary).

Great, you’re almost done. Now click on the Payout Bounty button. After clicking, MetaMask should pop up asking you to confirm a transaction. After clicking confirm, so long as you have enough funds in your account to pay the gas fee you should be good to go!

Advanced Payout

With advanced payout things get a bit (but not much more) complicated. Below is essentially same view as in basic payout and shows the GitHub Issue URL, the amount of the bounty, and the list of contributors that have submitted work. A key difference with advanced payout is that you can pay out any number of users regardless of whether they have submitted work.

You’ll also see a little button that says “Pay using bounty funds”. Don’t unselect this unless you know what you’re doing, because the alternative to payout out using bounty funds is to pay out the bounty from your own wallet. There are a few special cases where it makes sense to do this but usually it’s a bad idea.

It’s also worth noting that you can pay out more than 100% of the bounty if you really want to. In this case, once again, any additional funds will come out of your wallet as shown in the warning below.

Once you’ve selected each of the GitHub user names that you want to pay out, you can once again rate each contributor from 1–5 stars and proceed to set your gas fees just like in the basic payout flow.

However, note that using MetaMask is slightly different in the advanced payout flow, namely instead of one transaction, there will be two. In advanced payout, the first transaction is gas money so that the recipient of funds doesn’t have to pay it (as they’ll effectively need to accept a tip, don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense, it won’t affect how you use the platform).

After confirming, the second transaction for the actual token transfer should come up. Note that sometimes this second MetaMask confirmation window doesn’t pop up. If that happens check the extension icon. If you see a little number beside the icon click on it, that’s notifying you that there’s a transaction pending.

Once you’ve confirmed both of these transactions you should see a page like the one below.