What are Crypto Bounty Programs and Giveaways? – Phemex Blog

Author:
Jeffrey Craig
Date:
December 21, 2021

The cryptocurrency ecosystem has several ways of rewarding and incentivizing its users for their loyalty or contributions. In particular, through airdrops, crypto bounty programs, and giveaways. While each of these use different methods, the main purpose is to incentivize users and bring them into the desired crypto ecosystem with a small token of appreciation.

What is a Crypto Bounty?

A cryptocurrency bounty is a reward that users can receive for executing tasks assigned by a particular blockchain or crypto project. Crypto bounties are a significant rewards mechanism that blockchain projects use to get help from the community on specific and necessary tasks needed by the network.

What Does a Crypto Bounty Accomplish?

One of the primary motivations behind a bounty program is to promote a token’s initial coin offering (ICO). Similar to IPOs, ICOs need to create recognition to be successful. Essentially, crypto bounty reward programs are an extraordinary way to build recognition and engagement for a new token.

What Are Crypto Bounty Campaigns

A crypto bounty campaign is when a project tries to push its ICO and hence announces a promotion campaign where users execute marketing actions and gain tokens in return. These advertising marketing actions can be anything such as posting a photo or a video to elevate a particular project, or also by publishing reviews on forums and online community boards. As a trade-off for performing these promotional activities, users receive either free or discounted tokens.

Bounty rewards campaigns were a tremendous phenomenon during the ICO frenzy in 2017 and 2018. However, this marketing tool was frequently used by fraudulent projects to promote fake tokens. As a result, crypto enthusiasts became cautious of bounty programs and crypto giveaways. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also considered some ICOs and bounty rewards programs illegal.

Despite this, crypto bounty rewards programs remain an exceptionally inescapable showcasing strategy for advancing new tokens. Some blockchain projects include bounty rewards even after the successful launch of the token. Post-ICO rewards plans are centered around helping the project’s advancement.

What is a Crypto Bounty Hunter?

Due to the considerable amount of crypto bounty programs, it has created a new persona in the cryptocurrency world — a crypto bounty hunter. Bounty hunters are individuals pursuing various rewards programs and trying to profit from them simultaneously.

What Kind of Crypto Bounties Campaigns are There?

• Social Media Campaigns: These campaigns mainly bring the public’s attention to the ICO project by using the participant’s social media accounts. These are generally likes, reposts, and shares, typically on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, WeChat, WhatsApp, and YouTube.
• Content Creation Campaigns: These are targeted towards bloggers, writers, and video content creators, where a project encourages people to make articles, blog posts, or videos. The goal of this crypto bounty is for content to be spread out across social networks to increase the awareness of a project or ICO. Generally, the rewards will be dependent on the complexity, length, or public interaction on the content made.
• Bitcointalk Signature Campaigns: These campaigns are extended to members of the Bitcointalk forum. Users of Bitcointalk just need to put in an official ICO signature to their profiles. The quantity of stakes relies upon the ranking of the members. Normally, just the users who have a junior member rank or above on a certain discussion can partake in such events.
• Translation Campaigns: This bounty is similar to a content creation campaign but is focused on translation. Translating critical documents pertaining to the project in order to reach more users in countries different from a project’s core team. Specific documents usually include the ICO Whitepaper and the Bitcointalk ANN thread.

What is a Bug Bounty Program?

A bug bounty program is a bargain presented by numerous sites, associations, and programming developers by which people can get acknowledgment and remuneration for announcing bugs, particularly those relating to security exploits and weaknesses, but it can also include process issues and hardware flaws.

The motivation behind bug reporting is to boost the security and efficiency of various blockchains and software. Engineers and security experts report bugs and program weaknesses on blockchain frameworks that could be reported. These campaigns are usually not for the general public since there is technical knowledge involved.

What is Bitcoin Bounty Hunt?

Bitcoin Bounty Hunt was an Online First Person Shooter (FPS) game revolving around battling different players to collect their bounty. Bounty was procured by finding it in the online world, having many viewers of your stream, tips, and killing other players. The online bounty was converted to Bitcoin using the Bitcoin Lightning Network. The game has been closed down.

Examples of Crypto Bounties

• Polygon Network Bounty: The Polygon Network knew they had a flaw that enabled an attacker to double the amount of cryptocurrency they intended to withdraw, but did not know where in the code the flaw was. To solve this issues they ended up paying out a $2 million bug bounty reward to the individual who helped fix the bug.
• Immunefi crypto bounty platform: Immunefi is a crypto bounty services organization. They have partners which offer bounties through their platform and in October 2021 they added a pool of $5.5 million to distribute through their bug bounty platform.
• Ethereum bounty: Ethereum announced a bounty of up to $50,000 for bugs found in the network before the Altair upgrade. Developers would look for safety/finality-breaking bugs, denial of service (DOS) vectors, and parameter inconsistencies to move up the leaderboard for a chance to win the bounty. However, there are always other ways to obtain Ethereum.

What is a Cryptocurrency Giveaway?

A cryptocurrency giveaway is a reward mechanism that various brands, firms, and projects adopt to distribute free tokens to users that have either signed up for the giveaway or purchased products by the brand or company that is conducting the giveaway. However, users should be extremely cautious before signing up for any giveaways. This is because there have been several scams that have occurred under the cover of being an authentic cryptocurrency giveaway.

Tesla Bitcoin Giveaway

It is publicly known that Tesla CEO, Elon Musk is interested in cryptocurrency. Many crypto investors even buy and trade based on tweets from the CEO. Due to this, impersonators of Elon Musk have been creating social media profiles that lure investors into scams. For example, they will post about fake giveaways and offerings. Some estimates from the Federal Trade Commission say these scams have stolen at least $2 million from cryptocurrency investors. This is a good reminder that you should always perform due diligence and make sure any contest you want to participate in is run by a legitimate organization.

Burritos or Bitcoin?

Chipotle launched an interactive game named “Burritos or Bitcoin” where they gave away $100,000 in free burritos and $100,000 in Bitcoin on National Burrito Day. The game involved guessing the combination of a digital wallet, where one would hold their Bitcoin. Reports stated that this made Chipotle the first American restaurant to offer a cryptocurrency giveaway.

Examples of Crypto Giveaways

• Burger King crypto giveaway: Robinhood and Burger King teamed up to give away cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Burger King has a loyalty program that offered its users who spent more than $5 on their app a single token from a pool of BTC, ETH, and DOGE tokens.
• Artists’ Bitcoin giveaway: It is well known that Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin advocate. His company Cash App has partnered with Travis Scott, Lil B, and many other artists to give away Bitcoin (through the app) to their fans.
• Bitcoin giveaway for BlackGirlsCode: Mariah Carey teamed up with the Gemini cryptocurrency platform to give away Bitcoin. Users that signed up with the code “MARIAH” had their trading fees donated to BlackGirlsCode.

Conclusion

Crypto bounties and crypto giveaways are two entirely different mechanisms for cryptocurrency distribution. While the former is offered to anyone who can find a bug in various protocols or networks, and the latter is given away free to random individuals, they both can be used nefariously to lure or scam individuals and crypto novices.