Dear fellow community members,
Hope you all are doing well! A lot of the community members are participating in the altcoin bounty campaigns, which provides them an alternate earning. I am also one of them who actively participate in such ICO/altcoin bounty campaigns since a long time now. However, while participating, I came across a lot of issues which I want to highlight here to find a solution. Please note, this is nothing against the campaign managers. We don't really have a set of rules to start a bounty campaign which leads to various types of confusions. I will just try to highlight those pain areas so these can be avoided. Any constructive suggestions are welcome!
**Please note, it is nothing against the campaign managers because there is no set rules available. I am just trying to streamline the process. Please don't take it personally, instead provide your valuable suggestions**
1. Bifurcation of weeks are not mentioned:That is one of the major pain points of majority of the bounty campaigns. A clear bifurcation of weeks is not mentioned which leads to a lot of confusions and participants are getting denied their stakes. Some examples are,
(a)
Decentralized News Network Campaign - No clear instruction on when the targets needs to be fulfilled or reported for counting the stakes.
On the other hand, I have found the below threads where the weekly bifurcation is clearly mentioned. Both have taken different approach to get reports from the participants. Check both and suggest which one should be adopted.
(a)
TV-Two - Clear communication that each week ends on Thursday along with a google form to submit the weekly reports. Best approach.
(b)
P2PS Token - Clear bounty specific communication that each week ends on Friday along with the time. Ideal approach.
2. Maximum numbers of participants to be accepted:In 2017, we had couple of incidents where the developers of the coin denied paying out tokens to all participants and paid only few initial ones. One of such example is Hero token. After the end of the bounty, developers said they will only pay first 60 participants of the bounty and denied rest of them. While it's not entirely a fault of the manager, but it could have been avoided through clear communication before starting the bounty. So it is the responsibility of the campaign manager to gather this information and control the bounty participants accordingly.
HERO - It's either the breach of trust from the developers or the fault of the manager for not gathering required information before starting the bounty. It could have been avoided.
3. Removal of stakes for not participating for the entire ICO period:There are a lot of bounty campaigns who don't allow their participants to leave midway. If one participants are leaving midway, they simply remove the stakes that participants have earned. I strongly believe that's a malpractice and needs to be stopped. If someone has promoted a certain bounty campaign through signature for first two weeks and then join another interesting campaign, the first two week's stakes should remain intact and should be paid once the ICO ends. I have seen many campaigns are restricting their participants to leave midway and wiping off their earned stakes if someone is doing so. This is a malpractice and we should have a rule around it, so that community members can join interesting projects without the fear of loosing previous stakes.
Some examples of campaigns who are following this practice:
(a)
WELL Campaign - Their rule says "To receive a bounty reward, you must participate until the end of the campaign. If you were rejected, your stakes will be burned and returned to the bounty pool!" So if the bounty is running for two months, a participant can't leave in between. A signature campaign participants will have to stick to this bounty for these amount of time, otherwise all previous stakes will be burned. It is not an acceptable practice according to me.
(b)
KahnChat Campaign - Same rules. A signature campaign participant is not allowed to remove their signature until the ICO ends. That needs to be stopped.
4. KYC requirement:It's a relatively new thing. A lot of ICOs have started asking for KYC documents from their investors after USA and China banned ICO fund-rising. While that's an regulatory requirement for some ICOs but it needs to be communicated to the bounty participants while opening a bounty thread. I haven't yet seen any bounty campaign is asking for KYC documents from the bounty hunters, but I fear that a lot of campaigns will ask for it once the distribution time comes. So it is better to be sure.
I suggest to all campaign managers to have a clear communication with the developers about the KYC requirement. If an ICO needs the KYC documents from the bounty hunters as well, it needs to be mentioned in the thread. Otherwise it will create a lot of confusions very soon and can become a malpractice by the developers. So a manager needs to take the responsibility to inform it to the participants while opening the bounty thread.
I believe, I have covered most of the pain points in this thread. But I am a human and I tend to make mistakes. So if you can think of anything which needs to be added in this list, please reply and I will be happy to add.
Thanks for taking time to read!
