A few weeks ago Cent added the ability to tip. Although it’s still new, Centians are already incorporating tipping into their user behavior in novel and exciting ways. As of today, over $100 in tips have been distributed to other Centians.

@emily, @rayma, and @CryptoCanvas have already tipped some exceptionally great responses. While tipping has been limited to being a simple peer-to-peer payment function on other sites (and real life for that matter, tipping on Cent is different. When combined with Cent’s unique smart bounty contract, tipping provides bounty posters with enhanced powers: namely the power to invent new, as-of-yet unthought types of bounties.

In this installment of the Cent Spotlight, we’ll highlight some novel examples of how Centians have already started to combine tipping with their bounties and provide a few examples of bounties that we think tipping could help enhance.

Recent Examples of Tipping on Cent

One of the most popular bounties to be posted on Cent recently was from @CryptoCanvas. You can check the bounty out here. For those of you unfamiliar with CryptoCanvas.art, it’s a project that aims to create collaborative art on the blockchain and ensure that each artist maintains a modest entitlement *in perpetuity* to all sales and re-sales of the art works they contributed to.

Just one of @rishi2184’s unique pieces of art on CryptoCanvas

It’s a fantastic idea, but like all new projects, they ran into the ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum that businesses hit when starting up. So @CryptoCanvas posted an awesome $50 bounty requesting Centians try out their product and generate some art work for the project. As an added incentive, @CryptoCanvas offered to tip the 5 best drawings up to $10 in total if the artists of those drawings satisfied all of the requirements of the bounty and the drawing itself was purchased.

When all was said and the bounty closed, @CrypoCanvas paid out all 5 tips as planned. A total of three(!) tips went to @Rishi2184 for each of their pictures that was sold, with @Houwang and @Brianxv each earning one tip respectively. Just take a look at the art fellow Centian @Rishi2184 submitted for the bounty above - all thanks to a simple, but powerful bounty post on Cent to drum up that initial heartbeat all startups need.

That’s not just any old planet from OxUniverse, that’s @Ninjatron’s planet.

Another example of a unique bounty that incorporated tips was posted by @Ninjatron, the current boss of the Cent Leaderboard. As most Centians know by now thanks to @Ninjatron’s reliable and always entertaining space-themed responses to the weekly BOTI (Best of the Internet) bounty, they’re a fan of the cosmos.

So when @Ninjatron found out that OxUniverse, a cool new Ethereum game, was holding a contest with a legendary new planet up for grabs for whoever could get the most new user sign ups, well, it was a no-brainer for them to post a bounty requesting the support of their fellow Centians.

Since the actual bounty value wasn’t that large, @Ninjatron tried to make the bounty a little more attractive by promising to pay every Centian who satisfied the bounty requirements an extra $1 if they ended up winning the contest. Well, @Ninjatron officially won that legendary planet they were after, and seven Centians were tipped as promised (after a few hiccups with Metamask were resolved;).

Improving Bounties with Tipping

As many Centians have probably noticed, Cent’s smart bounty contract is not perfect for every type of bounty. Sometimes the number of great responses is less than expected, and sub-par responses sometimes get paid out. We know, there is still so much more we need to do.

If you’re following Cent’s Telegram (and if you aren’t you should be), you may have seen the discussion I had with fellow Centian Jon Phillips. After a few supremely successful early bounties, Jon recently had a challenging experience after setting a $22 bounty for Centians to tweet @proofofhardware, a new project they just started. The main issue was that less than 10 of the responses actually did what the bounty asked for, so some responses got paid out for, well, doing nothing.

While still not the optimum solution, tipping presents a viable - if temporary - solution to that and similar inconvenient problems. For example, instead of setting a $22 bounty and hoping for at least 10 great responses, a user can set a 2$ bounty initially, since that will still attract responders. To add that extra incentivize that responders are looking for as well as guarantee no money will be sent to a poor response, the bounty poster could mention that they will tip the best response $20, or that split it amongst a certain number of responses, or something else entirely.

On the other hand, tipping isn’t just for difficult bounties. One of the most popular bounties over the last month, and one of the most unique bounties to be posted on Cent for a while, was from Centian @evivz for a virtual crypto trading game on cryptoground.com — check it out here. The intent of @evivz was to award 100% of the bounty to the winner of the game they set up exclusively for Centians to play, but unfortunately that was before tipping was introduced. Now, however, Centians can attach a small bounty to their original post (say $2) and then, after the bounty ends, they can tip the winner the full amount they intended to award in the first place.