NEW PROGRAM IS AVAILABLE AT :

ARK has some great news about the GitHub Development Bounty Program. We have decided that with the New Year, the ARK GitHub Bounty Program will now become a PERMANENT GitHub bounty. What does that mean for you, dear ARK supporter? It means that this amazing program does not end after just 1 year, but will be running from 1.1.2018 until ARK runs out of funds! (hopefully never) :). You can receive some nice bounties helping with ARK development. An added benefit is that we are always on a lookout for talented devs to join our team in a more official and full-time paying job. Our GitHub contributors are usually our first candidates from which we hire.

Our GitHub bounty so far has been a smashing success! With more than 30 community devs participating in these bounties, we have also managed to hire 3 GitHub contributors on as full-time ARK employees because they showed dedication, skills, and, most of all, willingness to learn and be motivated.

One of the major changes we want to update you on is our need to refactor our Bounty payouts display information into USD instead of ARK, and provide less volatile payouts pegged to USD, but paid in ARK equivalent. I know we are not all here to talk about conventional money, but it’s still a more tangible way to represent the value they will receive in a way that is readily perceived.

We want to give every developer, hacker, and hobbyist who sees something special in ARK an opportunity to be rewarded for their valuable input to the ARK ecosystem. These funds will be awarded to any contributor who wants to further improve our code base, find critical bugs, or identify security breaches which might pose a threat to the ARK network.

All GitHub bounties are paid at the beginning of every month for contributions accepted and merged during a previous month. We will contact you either via Slack or GitHub.

How does it Work?

The program consists of contribution rewards, monthly contests, and even a chance to get funding for your own project. Let’s take a look at the different ways in which you can earn ARK for your contributions!

Pull Requests — $10 USD

Each accepted pull request from our development team will automatically reward you with $10 USD.

We value your time and energy finding areas for improvement within our code, no matter how big they are. While this is a small amount of ARK, the pull rewards can add up over time, and each one will automatically enter you into the second phase of our program — monthly bounties!

Note that adding new dependencies, upgrading dependencies, correcting links, typos, translation fixes, non-code related PRs count only once per month, per user. This won’t get you into “monthly bounties”, but you will get paid for merged PR ($10) — one per user.

Monthly Bounties

On top of each accepted pull, we’ll be selecting monthly winners, based on accepted PRs from month they were accepted, and giving you a chance to earn bigger amounts of ARK depending on scope, of your pull requests. All corresponding $10 USD accepted pull requests will be paid out separately from the monthly bounty winners***.

Currently (last updated for December 2018 payouts) :

1st : $2,000 USD

2nd: $1,500 USD

3rd: $1,000 USD

4th&5th: $250 USD / each

6th-8th : $50 / each

(+ all $10 merged PR’s and +$20 for all Core v2 PR’s)

Please note that for ease of tracking, PRs count in the month when they get merged, and not when they are submitted.

Security Bounty

We know that software will always have some flaws, and some can be hard to notice initially. As we take security of our network as a top priority, we are introducing a security/vulnerability bounty for any bugs or errors in the core ( https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/core ) that could potentially harm or exploit the ARK network.

To get this bounty:

never publicly disclose any exploit or vulnerability

never maliciously initiate an exploit on main network

In order to receive the bounty, you must send an in-depth explanation in an email to security@ark.io with steps to reproduce the bug, or open an issue on Github with the details of your findings. If the item is a security vulnerability, please do not publicly post to Github.

with steps to reproduce the bug, or open an issue on Github with the details of your findings. If the item is a security vulnerability, please do not publicly post to Github. ARK team will rate it on a scale, LOW — MEDIUM — CRITICAL — DOOMSDAY

LOW: $200

MEDIUM: $1000

CRITICAL: $2000

DOOMSDAY: Contact Us

If you also include a patch you will be eligible for additional 50% on top of these numbers.

Custom Projects

If you have a great idea which is not yet developed, and will help improve or make ARK better — it can be new API integration language, game, commerce plugin, other ARK related apps, hardware integration, … — get in contact with ‘boldninja’ on ARK Slack, before you start development, so we can talk it through.

RULES FOR CUSTOM PROJECTS:

MUST BE OPEN-SOURCE (MIT LICENSE), THE SAME LICENSE AS SEEN ON ARK GITHUB PROJECTS. ALL PROJECTS MUST BENEFIT ARK ECOSYSTEM AND MUST BE PUT ON GITHUB TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR GITHUB BOUNTY. MUST HAVE NOT BEEN AWARDED OTHER ARK RELATED BOUNTIES (NO DOUBLE DIPPING).

Want to chat with other developers and brainstorm on new exciting ideas or share your thoughts?

***Submitting PR (Pull-Request) is a tacit agreement of the ongoing terms. The decision of the winners is the sole responsibility of the ARK team, and no appeals will be taken. Every PR containing only typo corrections, link corrections, adding or deleting dependencies, eslint corrections, adding badges or small translations in local language (eg. document with typo, small typos in code) will be counted only once per month per GitHub user, and won’t count as part of the sum of your total monthly PRs, meaning that you might not be eligible for bigger monthly rewards. We reserve the right to change any rules and rewards on monthly basis, so you will always know what to expect for the next month, as we want to make GitHub bounty as fair as possible for all developers, and consistent from month to month. All USD currency equivalents will be paid at the current exchange rate of ARK at the time of payout.