At ARK, we put a special emphasis towards developers. They are our architects, builders, and pillars of the ecosystem’s foundation & future. At the beginning of this year, we started a new GitHub Development Bounty Program and that program has been a huge success. As with all of our programs, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our systems and we feel the time has come to make a few updates that will create more excitement and get new faces interested in helping build ARK while making the program more competitive for developers.

* Learn more about GitHub Dev Bounty Program at: https://bounty.ark.io

The blog post has already been updated to reflect recent changes. Change starts with merged pull-requests from 1st of August 2019 onwards.

In our recent quarterly meetings, we put a major focus on ensuring we are doing everything we can to encourage community involvement and developer interaction. During this process, we reviewed our current Developer Bounty Program and came up with several updates that take into account feedback from our current participants and community. As such, we are increasing the Tier rewards* and also introducing new competition rules that create a more exciting but fair monthly bonus system*.

*This does not apply to Tier 0 bounties which are custom proposals with a set contract and monetary award at the completion of milestones and security vulnerabilities.

Improving Rewards & Adding A Spice Of Competitiveness

The updated program is composed of two changes: increases to baseline tier rewards and a special bonus for the best contributors. These are the new tier rewards starting August 1st, 2019:

Tier 1 — $200 per merged PR (previously $100)

(previously $100) Tier 2 — $100 per merged PR (previously $50)

(previously $50) Tier 3 — $50 per merged PR (previously $25)

(previously $25) Tier 4 — $20 per merged PR (previously $10)

(previously $10) Tier 5 — discontinued (previously $5)

Tier 6 — discontinued (previously $1)

But that is not all! To bring some competition into our bounty program, we are introducing an additional rule that will reward the top 3 contributors each month:

20% BONUS: #1 Monthly Contributor (USD sum of all merged PRs)

- the number 1 contributor will receive a +20% bonus on their total USD sum (eg. if the biggest sum of individual contributions is $1,000 that total will be eligible for +20% bonus, for a total payout of $1,200 USD).

- the number 1 contributor will receive a +20% bonus on their total USD sum (eg. if the biggest sum of individual contributions is $1,000 that total will be eligible for +20% bonus, for a total payout of $1,200 USD). 10% BONUS: #2 Monthly Contributor (USD sum of all merged PRs)

- the number 2 contributor will receive a +10% bonus on their total USD sum (eg. the second biggest sum of individual contributions is $800, this will be eligible for +10% bonus for a total payout of $880 USD).

- the number 2 contributor will receive a +10% bonus on their total USD sum (eg. the second biggest sum of individual contributions is $800, this will be eligible for +10% bonus for a total payout of $880 USD). 5% BONUS: #3 Monthly Contributor (USD sum of all merged PRs)

- the number 3 contributor will receive a +5% bonus on their total USD sum (eg. the third biggest sum of individual contributions is $600, this will be eligible for +5% bonus for a total payout of $630 USD).

Note: In case of a tie in sum value the person with lesser number of PRs wins (as that means less but bigger impact pull-requests). If by any chance the number of PRs is also tied, the bonus percentages get added up and divided over the tied contributors (if two people tied for first place, we will add the first and second % bonuses (20%+10%) and divide them so each will get a 15% bonus).

As you can see, we are discontinuing the rewards for tier 6 (typos, link changes) and tier 5 (small documentation updates, dependency updates, styling/linting, mostly non-code related work). This kind of contribution will still earn a spot in our monthly developer contribution blog posts, but no longer constitute a monetary reward. This decision was made due to community feedback and developers either not claiming these lower tier rewards or expressing that a monthly mention would suffice.

Thank you!

We just want to say thank you to everyone who has supported ARK through their contributions over the last year. We wouldn’t be where we are without you and we hope that these updates help show our appreciation for your hard work and dedication towards helping improve ARK for the entire ecosystem. If you have been waiting on the sidelines, now is the perfect time to get started!

This all looks awesome. How can I get started?

More information available at https://bounty.ark.io

You can browse through a selection of our GitHub repositories at https://github.com/ArkEcosystem.

Please make sure to read our contributing guidelines and follow instructions there: https://docs.ark.io/guidebook/contribution-guidelines