Why the cryptocurrency space needs more bounty hunters.

In case you missed it: In part 1 of our bounty hunting series we showed how to earn Ether as a bounty hunter and in part 2, we described how we hunt down Slack scammers at Bounty0x .

Writing better software.

Bug bounties are a powerful solution for auditing code, developing code, and improving code. By posting a bug bounty, thousands of bounty hunters are incentivized to scan code for vulnerabilities and to submit their findings in order to claim the reward. If a startup were to invest the same amount of time to find bugs, the cost of doing so would be significantly greater.

As many people already know, it is critical for software to be flawless. This importance is underscored in the cryptocurrency space. If there is a bug in a facebook script then someone could lose pictures of their cats. A bug in a smart contract can result in the immediate loss of millions (or even billions) of dollars. As we all know, this has already happened. Thus it is an economically efficient solution for startups to invest in bug bounties.

Cost-effective marketing.

Second to technology, marketing is a second critical area where startups may benefit from posting bounties. Good marketing is crucial for cryptocurrency mainstream adoption as Blockchain is a concept that can be hard to grasp and many newcomers require a simplified introduction to the technology. Many blockchain start-ups choose to hold a bounty campaign prior to their fundraising period is because it is a very cost-effective marketing strategy. Bounty Hunters are rewarded in the start-up’s native token for writing articles, making videos and sharing content on social media.

Although technology is often more important than marketing, without proper marketing a technology will likely never get enough traction. Bounties are a crucial marketing machine in a space that urgently needs more marketers.

Our grain of sand.

On October 20th, we decided to launch a Bounty0x bounty campaign on our own Alpha platform. We allocated a 1 percent of all BNTY tokens as rewards to this bounty program, which is composed of bug bounties, improvement bounties, and several marketing bounties. Rewards will be distributed after our crowdsale in January 2018.

A small success story.

Not too long ago, we received a very interesting bug submission from a bounty hunter called Simon Kruse.

He found an issue with our API that would have allowed him to change the ether address of every single user on our network. However, Instead of exploiting this issue for his own benefit, he reported the bug and will receive a BNTY token allocation as a reward.

Call to action.

We encourage ALL blockchain startups to take a similar approach. The reputation of the cryptocurrency space is extremely fragile, and we can’t risk ruining it by suffering constant hacks. Companies like Status and Ethfinex have already seen the benefit that bounty campaigns offer and decided to launch one.

As a side note: The latter posted theirs on Bounty0x.

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