Collaborating on standards helps all parties involved

The Importance of Standards for Bounties on Ethereum

Bringing Interoperability, Reputation Tracking , Security, and a Rich Feature-Set to the Bounty Ecosystem

When we first set off to tackle the problem of bounties on Ethereum in early 2017, we quickly realized the need for a standard to develop around bounty transactions. We encountered a slew of untested, unaudited bounty contracts, each written for the specific use-case that the team was tackling. Ethereum smart contracts that store funds should first be privately audited by security-minded professionals, and then publicly audited through bug-bounty programs.

There are significant benefits from standardizing bounty contracts, namely:

Interoperability : Instead of rebuilding existing freelancing systems on Ethereum, what if we could take advantage of the open smart contract infrastructure to allow platforms to easily share the tasks created on their sites? Why shouldn’t I be able to post a bounty and lock up funds on one platform, and have that same bounty propogate across other platforms as well? Supporting a standard for bounties is better for users.

: Instead of rebuilding existing freelancing systems on Ethereum, what if we could take advantage of the open smart contract infrastructure to allow platforms to easily share the tasks created on their sites? Why shouldn’t I be able to post a bounty and lock up funds on one platform, and have that same bounty propogate across other platforms as well? Supporting a standard for bounties is better for users. Reputation Tracking : One of the problems that plagues most web2.0 gig-economy sites is that the reputation users build up on one platform never reflects across other platforms. I can screw people over on UpWork, only to move on to Fiverr and continue my spree of not paying my freelancers. A standard interface for the various freelance hiring actions makes it far easier to build up cross-platform reputation.

: One of the problems that plagues most web2.0 gig-economy sites is that the reputation users build up on one platform never reflects across other platforms. I can screw people over on UpWork, only to move on to Fiverr and continue my spree of not paying my freelancers. A standard interface for the various freelance hiring actions makes it far easier to build up cross-platform reputation. Security: The trustworthiness of a given smart contract increases as more people audit it for attack vectors. Organizing several platforms around a single standard encourages stakeholders from each of those individual communities to collaborate in the name of a more secure foundation to build their platforms atop.

We’ve also crafted the StandardBounties contract to support a highly robust feature-set, which allows for the public to contribute to the bounty, draft bounties, multiple correct submissions, updatable submissions, automated bounty acceptance, and bounty arbitration.

With these motivations in mind, we’re delighted to announce that Gitcoin has officially joined this effort in supporting StandardBounties, to reap the above benefits in the name of supporting open standards on Ethereum. This means that the bounties created on Gitcoin will now concurrently exist on the Bounties Network, and vice versa.

Standard Bounties 2.0

Looking ahead, we’re excited to also be working on a new version of StandardBounties, to relax some of the existing assumptions that were baked into the contract, and make it even easier for any platform on Ethereum to use bounties as a social tool to incentivize the completion of any task. We’re lucky to be collaborating with the Status Open Bounty team on this effort, and are now nearing the completion of a new version of the bounty contracts.

If you’re building a platform focused on freelancing or incentivizing task-completion, please join us in this effort. If you believe there’s missing functionality from this new version, or desire to help us with this effort, please don’t hesitate to reach out and collaborate with us.

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Special thanks to Kevin Owocki and Vivek Singh from Gitcoin for their contributions to this post.