The ICONOMI ICO bounty campaign ran from August 18 to September 29 (19:59:59 UTC), 2016. We reserved 2,000,000 ICN (2 % of the total amount) for bounty rewards. Due to a very successful ICO this translates to a present value of approximately 200,000 USD, making the ICONOMI bounty fund possibly the biggest in the history of initial coin offerings.

We support fair-play and reward true ICONOMI supporters! This is why we did everything in our power to keep the bounty distribution fair by eliminating all the spammers. One of the biggest challenges was the use of multiple Twitter / Facebook accounts by some of the “bounty hunters”. They were publicly debating their activities, while the community demanded something is to be done to prevent it.

For better understanding, here is one of the examples:

There is a lot of truth in what is told here. I have looked as many accounts twitter have come today and have just made a retweet of all messages of ICONOMI for an hour. Also have received the bounties. Therefore I have bought 30 accounts twitter for $1.3 from 1000 followers everyone, and now I do as everything, I just do a retweet of all messages by one stream. I think you won’t be able to discover all my accounts, and I will receive the money.

ICONOMI’s response was clear:

Good luck with your strategy. We’ll find your accounts and ban you. Spam won’t be tolerated at all.

Of course we were unable to detect every last one of them, but the majority were removed. With the techniques developed during the ICO, we were able to detect 52 separate participants with a total of 625 accounts, including the record holder with 73 accounts! Even in cases like these, we have approved bounty rewards for one of the multiple accounts. We are following a simple principle: one person — one account.

One of the detection techniques was monitoring the responses to posts on social media, where we explicitly said they should NOT be shared — easy to understand for humans, hard to detect for bots. The example below shows a tweet that was retweeted 145 times, despite a clear message it should not be retweeted. Non-abiding accounts were examined in detail.

On Saturday, October 8th 2:00 a.m. UTC we released the first part of ICNs acquired through the ICONOMI bounty reward programme, which provoked a lot of questions, debate on forums and a few complaints. After careful examination, taking into account the possible mistakes made by the ICONOMI bounty reward programme participants, we have decided to recalculate the bounty distribution, with all corrections considered. The calculation of the ICONOMI bounty reward programme ICN tokens is NOW FINAL.

We also have a distinct winner among the bounty programme participants — taking into account all his activities, translations, moderations and dedication to ICONOMI, he has earned a total of 228,429.5 ICN tokens, with a present value estimated at over 25,000 USD.

It is important to note — all 2,000,000 ICN tokens reserved for the bounty reward programme were assigned to true bounty participants. If the “spammers” described above had not been eliminated through our efforts, the bounty share remaining for true ICONOMI supporters would have been much smaller. We did everything in our power to reward all the honest ICONOMI supporters!

Thank you for your early stage support and your engagement in the ICONOMI ICO!