The original “Bugs Bounty” program was the creation of Jarrett Ridlinghafer while working at Netscape Communications Corporation as a technical support Engineer.

Netscape encouraged its employees to push themselves and do whatever it takes to get the job done and, in late 1995, Jarrett Ridlinghafer was inspired with the idea for, and coined the phrase, ‘Bugs Bounty’.

He recognized that Netscape had many enthusiasts and evangelists for their products, some of whom to him seemed even fanatical, particularly for the Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla browser. He started to investigate the phenomenon in more detail and discovered that many of Netscape’s enthusiasts were actually software engineers who were fixing the product’s bugs on their own.

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More recently, the concept of a bounty program comes from the online gaming world, where a bounty is a reward paid out to an individual or group for accomplishing certain objectives.

In the ICO sphere, bounty programs are used by blockchain startups to accomplish a wide range of tasks at the cost of the project’s token.